CLASSICS CLASSICSDAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE was born into a miner’s family in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, in 1885, the fourth of five children. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1911. In 1912 Lawrence went to Germany and Italy with Frieda Weekley, the German wife of a professor at Nottingham University College, where Lawrence had studied; she divorced, and they were married on their return to England in 1914. Lawrence had published Sons and Lovers in 1913; but The Rainbow, completed in 1915, was suppressed, and for three years he could not find a publisher for Women in Love, which he completed in 1917. After the First World War he travelled extensively in Europe, Australia, America and Mexico. He returned to Europe from America in 1925, and lived mainly in Italy and France. His last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, was published in 1928 but was banned in England and America. In 1930 he died in Vence, in the south of France, at the age of 44.
JAMES FENTON was born in Lincoln in 1949 and educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry. He has worked as a political journalist, drama critic, book reviewer, war correspondent, foreign correspondent and columnist. A collection of his pieces on major events in the Far East, All the Wrong Places, was published in 1990. He is also the author of Leonardo’s Nephew Essays on Art and Artists (1998), An Introduction to English Poetry (2002) and a history of the Royal Academy, where he is Antiquary. His volumes of poetry include Terminal Moraine and The Memory of War, and, in Penguin, Children in Exile, Out of Danger and The Love Bomb and Other Musical Pieces. His work has won him the Southern Arts Literature Award for Poetry, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Whitbread Award for Poetry. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was Oxford Professor of Poetry for the period 1994.