D. H. Lawrence

David Herbert Richards Lawrence was born in the mining town of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, on 11 September 1885. He was the fourth of five children born to Arthur John and Lydia (née Beardsall) Lawrence, a pit foreman and an ex-school teacher – or as Lawrence's self-satirising poem “Red-Herring” was to cast it, “a working man” and “a superior soul”. The social distinction between the parents was, to some degree, an illusion, since they actually came from the same extended family (they met at the home of mutual relatives: Arthur's aunt was married to Lydia's uncle) but it was enacted throughout the dismal marriage and established an antagonism that was to be crucial in shaping Lawrence's distinctive imagination:

O I am