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from Lawrence’s friend Jessie Chambers that the two read Symbolist poetry together. When Lawrence was working for his teaching degree, he studied French literature at the University of Nottingham under Ernest Weekley. Lawrence mentions specifically the poetry of Paul Verlaine in Sons and Lovers. Nowhere, though, it seems, does Lawrence speak directly of the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, and yet among all the Symbolists, it is Rimbaud’s ideas that seem closest to those of Lawrence. Rimbaud wrote these lines, which coincide with Lawrence’s attitude about modern love, particularly as it relates to his own writing of Women in Love: “I do not like women: love must be reinvented, that’s obvious. A secure position is all they’re capable of desiring now. Security once gained, heart and beauty are set aside: cold disdain alone is left, the food of marriage today” (Rimbaud, “Delirium I,” p. 39; see “For Further Reading”).

Women in Love is Lawrence’s manifesto on the reinvention of modern love, and it was in many ways as much of a bombshell as was The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx. Afterward, there would be modern and contemporary writers who would rival Lawrence, but none who surpassed him in this area. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby shows the undeniable influence of Lawrence in its treatment of the jaded rich, symbolized by Tom, and their dangerous ideas about race and culture, which are opposed by Gatsby, the symbol of romantic love. However, one could not imagine Gatsby questioning the meaning of modern love nor the tradition from which it sprang.

David Herbert Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885, near Nottingham, England, in the small mining town of Eastwood. His father, Arthur, was a coal miner, the kind of man, typical of workers the world over, who found himself in a dangerous, dead-end job, and even as a miner’s butty, a foreman of sorts, he could barely make a living. He drank to mask his frustration, his pain, and his fears, and he transferred his aggressions to his family in the form of a violence that, while mostly verbal, made their lives at times a living hell. Lawrence thought his mother, Lydia, a saint. However, she was no more a saint than the father was a devil. Like Arthur Lawrence, she, too, was frustrated by poverty and the ugliness of her surroundings. Like him, she transferred her blind hostility against her marginalization to her spouse, falling out of love with him and using his drinking as an excuse to hold him directly responsible for her unhappiness and the lack of opportunity for her children. The fact that her husband was risking his life in the mines every day to provide for her and the children meant nothing to her, and she inoculated her children with her contempt for her husband. No one loved Arthur. No one ever talked to him. No one cared if he lived or died, except as it affected their welfare, and this in turn hardened his attitude toward his family and made him an even more frequent visitor of the pubs. Lawrence duly documents all this in Sons and Lovers, and it is difficult not to feel a measured contempt for the mother and the children who hated their father, while at the same time driving him harder to provide more for them. Lawrence apparently never matured enough to gain perspective on how unfairly his father was treated, flawed though he certainly was.

Lawrence’s biographer, Harry T. Moore, writes about Mrs. Lawrence:

She was proud of these children, and fought fiercely to give them good lives: her sons would not go into the mines, her daughters would not become servants. And through the galling poverty of those years she made intense sacrifices for them, particularly in furthering the education of David Herbert—or Bert, as the family called him.

Unfortunately, this is only part of the story. The intensity of love that was in this woman’s being drove itself outwardly in two directions: she hated her husband and, just as extravagantly, she loved her children. These children became a battleground in the parents’ war (Moore, The Priest of Love, p. 11).

Lawrence began his