D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885–1912

"Here Worthen incorporates a mass of newly published Lawrenciana, chiefly letters, and thus, to a degree, renders all the existing biographies out of date. Worthen provides a wealth of information on Lawrence's family background, his coming-of-age in a Midlands mining community, tortuous early relations with women, first ventures into the working world and explosive burst of self-education." Publishers Weekly

"The familiar story, highly detailed, takes a fresh edge from new oral material and 2,000 unpublished letters and postcards...Acute and absorbing scholarship." Kirkus Reviews

"This is the finest biography of Lawrence ever written....It is as if for the first time we see Lawrence whole. In the bargain this persuasive biography is compulsive good reading from cover to cover. A major event in modern literary studies." Keith Cushman, Library Journal

"This is a large-scale map of a tiny island, faithful to the contours, vicissitudes and themes of Lawrence's life as he himself laid them out, and venturing out of those boundaries only infrequently. Lawrence was more nasty, more expansive and more complex than such strict documentation can convey, but within his documentary form Mr. Worthen has written an exciting first volume and an indispensable record." New York Times Book Review

"Worthen has researched deeply, reading everything even remotely relevant, and is able to be authoritative where others have conjectured. It is a warm as well as a serious book, for he clearly loves his subject and makes us share his feeling. He is both alert and scrupulous in relating Lawrence's fiction to his life, and properly cautious in his use of memoirs and reported conversations. The theme of the development of the miner's son and sickly scholarship boy with warring parents is a wonderful one, and he grasps all its possibilities in the 500 pages of his narrative." Claire Tomalin, The Independent

"...It is hard to imagine that this biography will soon be superseded." Sir Frank Kermode, The Guardian

"Volumes two and three will be by Mark Kinkead-Weekes and David Ellis. If they match Worthen's in range, rigour and readability, this will be a biography of Lawrence to eclipse all others." John Carey, The Sunday Times

"...a superb biography..." Anthony Curtis, The Financial Times

"We see more vividly than ever before the agonizing push and pull of Lawrence's youth, torn between the spontaneity and physicality of his miner father and the more fearless ambition of his more educated mother, who dreamed of a life for her son far from the mining shafts of Nottinghamshire." Booklist

"The story of how Lawrence and Frieda got together and how their union enabled him to free himself of the 'dreadful and deadly self-sacrificial power of his mother' is, undoubtedly, one of the most unlikely, tempestuous, yet triumphant love stories of our time." American Libraries