Sea and Sardinia

D. H. Lawrence

Feb 2021 · Voices of Today · Narrated by Phil Benson

About this audiobook

Sea and Sardinia

by D.H.Lawrence

Narrated by Phil Benson

At the end of World War 1, D. H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda (‘the queen bee’), exiled themselves from England and set up home in Sicily. On the spur of the moment, Lawrence proposed a short trip to Sardinia. Setting off before dawn, they embarked on a whirlwind tour, by train to Palermo, ferry to Cagliari, and by train and bus to Terranova, returning to Rome by ferry. Back in Sicily Lawrence wrote Sea and Sardinia, one of the great travel journals of the twentieth century, in six weeks and entirely from memory. Alternately enthusiastic and grumpy, but always effusive, Lawrence’s journal sparkles with observations of the day-to-day detail of travel and characters encountered on the way

Production Copyright 2020 Voices of Today.

About the author

D(avid) H(erbert) Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885. His father was a coal miner and Lawrence grew up in a mining town in England. He always hated the mines, however, and frequently used them in his writing to represent both darkness and industrialism, which he despised because he felt it was scarring the English countryside. Lawrence attended high school and college in Nottingham and, after graduation, became a school teacher in Croyden in 1908. Although his first two novels had been unsuccessful, he turned to writing full time when a serious illness forced him to stop teaching. Lawrence spent much of his adult life abroad in Europe, particularly Italy, where he wrote some of his most significant and most controversial novels, including Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterly's Lover. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, who had left her first husband and her children to live with him, spent several years touring Europe and also lived in New Mexico for a time. Lawrence had been a frail child, and he suffered much of his life from tuberculosis. Eventually, he retired to a sanitorium in Nice, France. He died in France in 1930, at age 44. In his relatively short life, he produced more than 50 volumes of short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel journals, and letters, in addition to the novels for which he is best known. Phil Benson is an audiobook narrator, who lives in Sydney. Born in Manchester, he has a particular interest in recording and promoting Lancashire literature.