The White Peacock

D.H. Lawrence

Oct 2021 · Voices of Today · Narrated by David Beed

About this audiobook

The White Peacock


By D. H. Lawrence


Narrated by Patrick Barker


Lawrence’s first novel tells the tale of a love triangle between Lettie Beardsall and her neighbours, George Saxton, son of a farmer, and Leslie Tempest, the local mine owners’ son. Lettie will marry Leslie, but remain sexually attracted George. George also marries but falls victim to alcohol. Inspired by Maurice Greiffenhagen’s painting ‘An Idyll’, ‘The White Peacock’ is both a romance and a novel about class and the industrialisation of the English countryside that draws on Lawrence’s youth. Though it bears traces of his apprenticeship as a novelist, ‘The White Peacock’ is a mature work that anticipates the psychological themes of ‘Sons and Lovers’ and the gamekeeper character of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’.





Production copyright 2021 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.