The Fight for Barbara

by D.H. Lawrence

D H Lawrence (1885-1930) was an English writer, poet and playwright whose collected works represent, among other things, an extended reflection on the dehumanising effect of modernity and industrialisation. Some of the issues he explores are sexuality, emotional health, spontaneity and instinct. Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in voluntary exile. At the time of his death his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents but in an obituary notice E M Forster challenged this view, and later literary critic F R Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and moral seriousness. Lawrence is best known for his novels Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), and Lady Chatterley's Lover. The latter was first published privately in Italy in 1928, then in France in 1929. An unexpurgated edition was not published openly in the UK until 1960 when it was the subject of a watershed obscenity trial against the publisher Penguin Books who won the case and quickly sold 3 million copies. The Fight for Barbara, A Comedy in Four Acts, (1912) is a little-known, seldom performed, semi-autobiographical play which shares some of the themes of Lawrence's great novels, telling the story of a wealthy woman who leaves her husband and elopes to Italy with the son of a coal miner she has known for only three weeks, sparking a scandal which strikes at the whole of British society and has a huge impact on her titled family.

48 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English writer of the 20th century, whose prolific and diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism, and personal letters. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, human sexuality and instinct.

Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage." At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel. He is now generally valued as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.H._Law...