The Wedding Ring

D. H. Lawrence

Mar 2013 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this eBook

When D.H. Lawrence wrote The Rainbow and Women in Love he had intended for it to be a single novel. One of the names he was considering was The Wedding Ring. The publisher, however, chose to break the work into two novels. Here are the two novels once again in single form. This novel follows generations of the Brangwen family, focusing on the sexual dynamics of, and relations between, the characters. Lawrence's frank treatment of sexual desire and the power plays within relationships as a natural and even spiritual force of life caused The Rainbow to be prosecuted in an obscenity trial in late 1915, as a result of which all copies were seized and burnt. After this ban it was unavailable in Britain for 11 years.

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.