| 1885 | David Herbert Lawrence is born on September 11 in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, a working-class mining town in central England. The sickly Lawrence is confined to bed for much of his early childhood and grows close to his mother, who tends to him. |
| 1898- 1901 | Lawrence attends Nottingham High School on a scholarship, then takes a job as a clerk in a surgical appliance factory, but he leaves after suffering an attack of pneumonia. His brother, William Ernest, dies in October 1901. |
| 1902- 1906 | Lawrence takes a part-time teaching job at the British Schools in Eastwood and attends a teacher-training center in Ilkeston. |
| 1906 | Lawrence enrolls at University College, Nottingham, to get his teacher’s certificate; he leaves after two years. |
| 1909- 1910 | The English Review publishes several of Lawrence’s poems. His mother, Lydia, dies in December 1910; Lawrence assists her by administering an overdose of morphine. |
| 1911 | Lawrence’s first novel, The White Peacock, is published. |
| 1912 | Lawrence and Frieda von Richthofen, the wife of Lawrence’s former Nottingham professor Ernest Weekley and cousin of famous aviator Manfred von Richthofen (also known as the “Red Baron”), run away to Germany and Italy. |
| 1913 | Rejected at first by Heinemann Publishers, the autobiographical Sons and Lovers is published. Criticized for his graphic depiction of sexual relations, Lawrence defends himself by stating that “whatever the blood feels, and believes, and says, is always true.” |
| 1914 | World War I breaks out. Lawrence and Frieda marry on July 13. Unable to obtain passports, for the duration of the war they are forced to live in various places in England, including Cornwall and Derbyshire, where they share a house with John Middleton Murry and the writer Katherine Mansfield. |
| 1915 | Upon the publication of The Rainbow, Lawrence is prosecuted for his graphic descriptions of sex, and the novel is suppressed. More than 1,000 copies of the book are burned. |
| 1916 | Lawrence is introduced to Lady Ottoline Morrell, the wife of a liberal member of Parliament, and she becomes one of his most important patrons. Through her, Lawrence forms acquaintanceships with Aldous Huxley, E. M. Forster, and Bertrand Russell. Lawrence writes Women in Love, the sequel to The Rainbow. |
| 1917 | Lawrence and Frieda are suspected of being spies for the Germans. |
| 1919 | The Lawrences journey throughout Europe, stopping in Sicily, Sardinia, and Switzerland. |
| 1920 | Lawrence publishes Women in Love in New York. |
| 1921 | Women in Love is published in London. Movements in European History, Lawrence’s first major nonfiction work, is published , as is his Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. |
| 1922 | Aaron’s Rod, a novel that reflects the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche on Lawrence, is published. The Lawrences travel to Ceylon and Australia, where Aaron’s Rod is set. James Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land are published . |
| 1923 | They visit Mexico as well as New York and Los Angeles. Studies in Classic American Literature—in which Lawrence considers Benjamin Franklin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and others—is published. |
| 1924- 1925 | Mabel Dodge Luhan, a New York socialite, gives the Lawrences her Kiowa Ranch in Taos, New Mexico, in return for the original manuscript of Sons and Lovers. Lawrence’s father, Arthur, dies. While visiting Mexico City, Lawrence falls ill with tuberculosis and is forced to return to England. |
| 1925- 1926 | The Lawrences settle near Florence. Frieda begins an affair with Angelino Ravagli, a former Italian infantry officer whom she will marry in 1950. Lawrence visits his hometown of Eastwood for the last time. The Plumed Serpent, a political novel about Mexico and a revival of its ancient Aztec religion, is published. |
| 1928 | Lady Chatterley’s Lover is published; it is banned in the United Kingdom and the United States, creating a great demand for the book. |
| 1929 | Lawrence’s Expressionist paintings, for which he gains posthumous renown, are declared obscene and confiscated from an exhibition at London’s Warren Gallery. |
| 1930 | Lawrence succumbs to tuberculosis on March 2 in Vence, France. Frieda moves to Kiowa Ranch, New Mexico, where she builds a small memorial chapel that houses Lawrence’s ashes. |
| 1960 | An unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is published after Penguin Books is acquitted of obscenity charges brought under the Obscene Publications Act. The trial lasts six days; the thirty-five expert witnesses called to testify include E. M. Forster. |