D. H. Lawrence's Non-Fiction: Art, Thought and Genre

by David Ellis, Howard Mills

This is the first book devoted entirely to Lawrence's nonfictional writings. It focuses on a selection of representative texts, each of which is placed in an appropriate literary or historical context. These include the 'Study of Thomas Hardy', the two books about the Unconscious, the travel-writing - primarily Twilight in Italy and Sea and Sardinia - the largely autobiographical 'Introduction to Memoirs of the Foreign Legion by M. M' and the late 'thoughts in verse' called Pansies. David Ellis and Howard Mills challenge the automatic relegation to secondary status suffered by these works in the past and suggest a radical reassessment of Lawrence's literary profile of how his writings relate to one another and of where his greatest power and originality lie.

200 pages, Hardcover

First published June 24, 1988

About the author

David Ellis was born in Lancashire, educated at Downing College Cambridge, and is emeritus professor of English Literature at the University of Kent in Canterbury. During his teaching career he has spent considerable periods in France, Italy, Australia and the United States. In the academic year 1991-2, he was an Andrew Mellon Fellow at the National Humanities Research Center in North Carolina and in the autumn of 2003 a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study of La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. Best known for this work on D.H. Lawrence, he has also published books on Wordsworth and Shakespeare and has a strong interest in comedy as well as in the art, science, and theory of biography. David Ellis is married with two daughters and now lives in Faversham, Kent.