Biography: 'Most English of English writers," Elizabeth Bowen called him in 1947; while, a year later, F.R. Leavis placed him, famously, within "the great tradition" of the English novel, a tradition beginning with Jane Austen (and taking in two non-English writers, Henry James and Joseph Conrad).
But D.H. Lawrence - born in Eastwood, near Nottingham, in 1885 - found himself conspicuously an outsider from the word go, detached from both the society around him and whatever "petty-bourgeois" alternatives he may have perceived. As someone said of a minor character in one of his novels (The Boy in the Bush, 1924), he was "one of the odd, borderline people who don't, and can't, really belong".
Like his mother, Lydia Lawrence, he was never at ease with the proletarian camaraderie which sustained his father, Arthur; the rough-and-tumble of his elementary schooling didn't suit his temperament either - but, when he got to Nottingham High School by means of a scholarship, the miner's son stood out like a factory chimney among his middle-class contemporaries, all of them much of a muchness. His singularity, established early, persisted in ways both good and bad for the remainder of his life.
He had his resources, indeed. As "a brilliant mimic and comedian", when his social side was uppermost, he gained a certain popularity; and at nearby Haggs farm, two miles north of Eastwood, the Chambers family provided for the adolescent Lawrence a refuge from the dissatisfaction of his own home. His complicated relations with Jessie Chambers, the predominant friend of his youth and earliest literary helpmate, have been well documented. So have his escapades and difficulties with other girls and women, including Louie Burrows, to whom he got insecurely engaged in 1910, while his mother was dying of cancer.
Both this engagement and a possible teaching career were scuppered early in 1912 when Lawrence (already known as the author of several published stories, one or two plays and a novel, The White Peacock) went to see Prof Ernest Weekley at Nottingham University, and there came face to face with Weekley's German wife, Frieda. Lawrence's biographer isn't exaggerating when he says, "the next half an hour changed his life".
An affair ensued, and then marriage (once Frieda became free to marry); it seemed these two were in some fundamental way essential to one another, despite the infidelities, the public rows and ructions, the plates smashed over Lawrence's head and Frieda's incessant bewailing of the children she'd abandoned when Lawrence detached her from her domestic setting.
It was a life beset with difficulties, for all its exhilarations: propertyless, financially shaky, abundant in let-downs and betrayals of one sort or another, with pusillanimous publishers forever demanding literary alterations Lawrence wasn't prepared to make. A lot of it took place abroad, with Italy and Sicily following the initial flight to Germany. It entailed considerable borrowing and renting of flats and houses, including the Cornish cottage the Lawrences inhabited in 1916, which Katherine Mansfield dubbed "The Phallus", and in which they experienced the consequences of being German - or of having a German wife - in wartime. Postwar disillusion - a sense of the "barrenness" of everything - drove them out of England again in 1919, to Capri, Syracuse, Sardinia, Ceylon, Australia, New Mexico . . .
All these destinations betoken a restlessness which might seem at odds with the steady production of major works of literature. And yet the books were written: the travel books, the poems, the essays, the reviews, the social criticism, above all the novels and stories whose originality and intensity enlarged the scope of English fiction.
Since his death from tuberculosis in 1930, D.H. Lawrence has been the subject of more than one biography and a good many memoirs, including those by his sister Ada, his wife and his childhood friend, George Neville, as well as being a significant presence in other literary lives (that of Katherine Mansfield, for example). His experiences have been exhaustively chronicled. John Worthen, Lawrence specialist par excellence, has already contributed The Early Years to the Cambridge three-volume biography (1991-98).
Do we really need a retelling of the Lawrence story, then? Well, the current Life of an Outsider, by focusing on the "misfit" aspect of Lawrence's personality and concomitant analysis of English society, adds up to a compelling narrative portrayal rather than a comprehensive biographical study. And its succinctness and richness of incident are enough to make it an engrossing read. But it also reminds us of the depth and power of Lawrence's imagination, his social analyses and preoccupations and the terrible treatment meted out to his novels, from The Rainbow on. (The Belfast critic and columnist, Robert Lynd, was among the fearfully hostile contemporary reviewers of The Rainbow.) That book was banned; and then its successor, Women in Love, failed to find a publisher. It first appeared in the US in 1920, prompting Wyndham Lewis to comment in a letter: "Lawrence has brought out another dirty book, procurable at enormous expense from America. It is full of thighs and loins and Midland hecticness . . .". And for Middleton Murry (a one-time friend), the characters in the novel "writhe continually, like the damned, in a frenzy of sexual awareness of one another".
Lawrence might have said, be damned to the lot of them, when he embarked on his last great work, Lady Chatterley's Lover. This, in its various underground editions, must have confirmed many people's view of the author as "a lurid sexuality specialist". It took some time to reinstate Lawrence - and even today, with Lawrence studies proliferating, his work attracts admirers and detractors in about equal measure. A judicious, sympathetic and illuminating account such as John Worthen's, though, is invaluable in providing a context for the misjudgements and misreadings to which Lawrence was subjected - and, ultimately, for his unique achievement.
D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, By John Worthen Allen Lane, 518pp. £30.
Patricia Craig is a critic and author. Her biography of Brian Moore was published in paperback in 2004