Book of the week: Burning Man

Frances Wilson sifts through D.H. Lawrence’s legacy for ‘what remains urgent and alive’

DH Lawrence

Frances Wilson produced one of the finest biographies of recent years with her 2016 study of Thomas De Quincey, Guilty Thing, said David Wheatley in Literary Review. Her new work, an equally unconventional biography of D.H. Lawrence, belongs “in the same league”. Lawrence has been in “reputational deep-freeze” since the early 1970s, when feminists accused his work of being patriarchal and misogynistic.

Wilson is undaunted: she bravely attempts to “bring him in from the cold”. Her book focuses on a single decade – 1915 to 1925 – during which Lawrence broke decisively with England, moving first to Italy and then New Mexico. She suggests that the non-fiction Lawrence produced in this period – notably his travel writing about Italy and his essays on American literature – is his finest work. “Articulate and persuasive”, Wilson sifts through Lawrence’s legacy for “what remains urgent and alive”.

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