Lawrence's genius is unquestioned, but he is seldom considered a writer interested in comedy. This 1996 collection of essays by distinguished scholars explores the range, scope and sheer verve of Lawrence's comic writing. Comedy for Lawrence was not, as his contemporary Freud insisted, a mere defence mechanism. The comic mode enabled him to function parodically to undermine radically those forms of authority from which he always felt estranged. Lawrence's critique of the modern failure of the mystic impulse is present in all the comic moments in his writing where it is used to create an alternative cultural and social space. Lawrence used humour to distance himself from the dominant orthodoxy surrounding him, from the material of his fiction, from his readers, and, finally, from his own often intensely serious preoccupations. This book revises the popular image of Lawrence as a humourless writer and reveals his strategic use of a genuine comic talent.

The novel here called The First 'Women in Love' is the first version of the novel widely regarded as Lawrence's greatest: Women in Love. Lawrence wrote it in 1916 and did his very best to have it published; but his previous novel had been banned and The First 'Women in Love' was rejected by every publisher who saw it. As a result its very existence as an independent text has been ignored and it is now published for the first time. It shares much of its material with the final version of the novel, but its central relationships are dissimilar and the ending radically different. Above all, its tone is more positive, the final version being influenced by Lawrence's increasing sense of isolation. The First 'Women in Love' is, arguably, one of Lawrence's very greatest works; it is a piece of fiction generated in - and in many ways searingly and poignantly addressed to - the England, and the Europe, of the First World War.

This volume collects together the introductions and reviews for which Lawrence was responsible over the whole duration of his writing career, from 1911 to 1930: it includes the book review which was the last thing he ever wrote, in the Ad Astra Sanatorium in Vence. The forty-nine separate items include some of his most compelling literary productions: for example, the fascinating Memoir of Maurice Magnus of 1921-22, his only extended piece of biographical writing. The volume's Introduction not only outlines the literary contacts of Lawrence's career which led him to doing such work, but gives a fresh account of the life of a literary professional who regularly wrote in support of work in which he personally believed, and who also (rather surprisingly) wrote reviews of nearly thirty books. All the texts, including a number previously unpublished in Britain, have been freshly edited and are supplied with extensive Explanatory notes.

D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love - 'the beginning of a new world', as he called it - suffered in the course of its revision, transcription, and publication some of the most spectacular damage ever inflicted upon one of his books. Until now no text of Women in Love has ever been published which is faithful to all of Lawrence's revisions. This edition, edited by scholars in England and America, clears the text of literally thousands of accumulated errors allowing its readers to read and understand the novelist's work as he himself created it. The edition includes the 'Foreword' Lawrence wrote in 1919 and two preliminary and discarded chapters which have attracted widespread critical and biographical discussion. The introduction gives a full history of the novel's composition, revision, publication and reception, and notes explain allusions and references; the textual apparatus records all variants between the base-text and the first printed editions.

Studies in Classic American Literature, first published in 1923, provides a cross-section of D. H. Lawrence's writing on American literature, including landmark essays on Benjamin Franklin, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. Eight of the essays were first published in the English Review 1918-19; but Lawrence continued to work on his material, with the aim of producing a full-length book; at various times fifteen separate items belonged to it, all of them revised on different occasions, some of them four or five times, and often corrected with the errors of their predecessors preserved. This volume offers the final 1923 version of the text in a newly corrected and uncensored form, and the complete surviving text of the essays of the English Review period, as well as a host of other materials, including four different versions of Lawrence's pioneering essay on Whitman.

This 2004 volume collects together the introductions and reviews for which Lawrence was responsible over the whole duration of his writing career, from 1911 to 1930: it includes the book review which was the last thing he ever wrote, in the Ad Astra Sanatorium in Vence. The forty-nine separate items include some of his most compelling literary productions: for example, the fascinating Memoir of Maurice Magnus of 1921 2, his only extended piece of biographical writing. The volume's Introduction not only outlines the literary contacts of Lawrence's career which led him to doing such work, but gives a fresh account of the life of a literary professional who regularly wrote in support of work in which he personally believed, and who also (rather surprisingly) wrote reviews of nearly thirty books. All the texts, including a number previously unpublished in Britain, have been edited and are supplied with extensive explanatory notes."

The Civil War, the Protectorate, and the Restoration – the extraordinary upheavals at the fulcrum of English history – are embodied here in the story of a remarkable man, politician, and prisoner: the regicide Henry Marten. As an organiser of the trial of Charles I and a signatory of the King’s death warrant, he was targeted for prosecution once the monarchy was restored in 1660. Marten was convicted of High Treason and spent years on the equivalent of death row, writing letters that now give a rare and extraordinary insight into the life of a prisoner in the Tower of London. John Worthen’s revelatory biography uncovers the brilliant mind, modern mindset, political vigour, tender bravery, and extraordinarily emblematic life of a neglected seventeenth-century figure.

Author of 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', 'Kubla Khan' and 'Christabel', and co-author with Wordsworth of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the great writers and thinkers of the Romantic revolution. This innovative introduction discusses his interest in language and his extraordinary private notebooks, as well as his poems, his literary criticism and his biography. John Worthen presents a range of readings of Coleridge's work, along with biographical context and historical background. Discussion of Coleridge's notebooks alongside his poems illuminates this rich material and finds it a way into his creativity. Readers are invited to see Coleridge as an immensely self-aware, witty and charismatic writer who, although damaged by an opium habit, responded to and in his turn influenced the literary, political, religious and scientific thinking of his time.

Author of 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', 'Kubla Khan' and 'Christabel', and co-author with Wordsworth of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the great writers and thinkers of the Romantic revolution. This innovative introduction discusses his interest in language and his extraordinary private notebooks, as well as his poems, his literary criticism and his biography. John Worthen presents a range of readings of Coleridge's work, along with biographical context and historical background. Discussion of Coleridge's notebooks alongside his poems illuminates this rich material and finds it a way into his creativity. Readers are invited to see Coleridge as an immensely self-aware, witty and charismatic writer who, although damaged by an opium habit, responded to and in his turn influenced the literary, political, religious and scientific thinking of his time.

Lawrence's genius is unquestioned, but he is seldom considered a writer interested in comedy. This 1996 collection of essays by distinguished scholars explores the range, scope and sheer verve of Lawrence's comic writing. Comedy for Lawrence was not, as his contemporary Freud insisted, a mere defence mechanism. The comic mode enabled him to function parodically to undermine radically those forms of authority from which he always felt estranged. Lawrence's critique of the modern failure of the mystic impulse is present in all the comic moments in his writing where it is used to create an alternative cultural and social space. Lawrence used humour to distance himself from the dominant orthodoxy surrounding him, from the material of his fiction, from his readers, and, finally, from his own often intensely serious preoccupations. This book revises the popular image of Lawrence as a humourless writer and reveals his strategic use of a genuine comic talent.

This first volume of the three-volume Cambridge Biography of D. H. Lawrence draws on a wide range of documentary and oral sources, many of them previously unpublished, to reveal a complex portrait of an extraordinary man. It describes his upbringing in a small colliery town in Nottinghamshire, and the years he spent as a teacher in London before the blossoming of his literary career. It offers new insights into his disastrous sexual experiments with Jessie Chambers, Helen Corke, Louie Burrows and Alice Dax, and provides a radically new account of his early relationship with Frieda Weekley, six years older than he, married and with three children, but to Lawrence the "woman of a lifetime." The volume ends with Lawrence completing his great autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers, destined to become one of the most widely read novels of the twentieth century. Volume 2 (1912-1922) by Mark Kinkead-Weekes and Volume 3 (1922-1930) by David Ellis will be published in late 1992 and early 1994, respectively. John Worthen, the author of D. H. Lawrence and the Idea of the Novel (1979, Rowman and Littlefield) and D. H. Lawrence: A Literary Life (1989, St. Martin's Press) has edited several of the volumes in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence. ID. H. Lawrence: The Cambridge Biography

Love Among the Haystacks and Other Stories gathers together all of Lawrence's short stories not collected in the Prussian Officer volume. It offers a range of work from Lawrence's earliest surviving published story, 'A Prelude', to 'New Eve and Old Adam' written at the height of his early maturity in 1913. Each story in this edition appears in a new, authoritative text based on the manuscripts, typescripts, corrected proofs and early printings drawn from libraries and private collections in England, Italy and America. All the stories have thus been stripped of the layers of errors introduced by typists, editors and printers in their previous publication. John Worthen's introduction sets out the composition and publication history of each story, and gives a full account of the context in which it was created. A textual apparatus records all variant readings and explanatory notes explain allusions, dialect forms and foreign words.

D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love - 'the beginning of a new world', as he called it - suffered in the course of its revision, transcription, and publication some of the most spectacular damage ever inflicted upon one of his books. Until now no text of Women in Love has ever been published which is faithful to all of Lawrence's revisions. This edition, edited by scholars in England and America, clears the text of literally thousands of accumulated errors allowing its readers to read and understand the novelist's work as he himself created it. The edition includes the 'Foreword' Lawrence wrote in 1919 and two preliminary and discarded chapters which have attracted widespread critical and biographical discussion. The introduction gives a full history of the novel's composition, revision, publication and reception, and notes explain allusions and references; the textual apparatus records all variants between the base-text and the first printed editions.

Worthen provides a substantial introduction to Lawrence's The Lost Girl, tracing the novel's development from rough drafts through publication and censorship. Included in this edition is a hitherto unpublished version of the opening chapter.

First published in 1923, this anthology provides a cross-section of Lawrence's writing on American literature. It includes landmark essays on Benjamin Franklin, Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. The volume offers the final 1923 version of the text in a newly corrected and uncensored form, and earlier (often very different) versions of many of the essays, and other materials (including four versions of Lawrence's pioneering essay on Whitman).

This casebook on D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers is the first to address itself to the full text of the novel, first published in 1992. The introduction discusses the novel's composition and the range of approaches adopted by critics since its original publication in 1913. The nine essays
that follow demonstrate the full extent of the contemporary critical response, from studies of narrative technique to psychoanalytic and gender-based analysis, and set the critical agenda for its study in the twenty-first century. This collection also reproduces excerpts from Lawrence's letters
relating to Sons and Lovers, along with a full transcription of Alfred Booth Kuttner's 1916 Freudian analysis of the work.

This first complete edition of Lawrence's plays contains eight full-length plays and two fragments. Six of the plays - A Collier's Friday Night, The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd, The Merry-go-Round, The Married Man, The Fight for Barbara and The Daughter-in-Law - were written between 1909 and 1913, the period when Lawrence was establishing himself as a writer. They are arguably among his very best early work. Yet Lawrence never saw a play of his own on the stage. Only two were performed in his lifetime, and only three were published: the play often regarded as his best, The Daughter-in-Law, remaining unpublished until 1965. Up to now, the plays have existed only in faulty or incomplete texts; this edition, drawn from Lawrence's own surviving manuscripts and typescripts, makes it possible for the first time to read and to stage Lawrence's plays as he wrote them. Published in two volumes.

The First 'Women in Love' is one of Lawrence's greatest works, and is the only full length work of fiction which he completed between The Rainbow and the extensively revised Women in Love. It is a piece of fiction generated in the England, and the Europe, of the First World War. Publishers were alarmed by the fate of his previous novel The Rainbow and The First 'Women in Love' was rejected by every publisher who saw it. As a result it is a novel whose very existence as an independent text has been ignored, and which has not been published until now. The First 'Women in Love' shares much of its material with Women in Love, but its central relationships are dissimilar, and the ending radically different.

"The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd," written immediately after Sons and Lovers, is one of D. H. Lawrence's most significant early works. The play, Lawrence's first, is the alter ego of the story "Odour of Chrysanthemums" and, like the short story, deals with a catastrophe in the lives of a coal mining family. Drawing upon the intensity of events that unfold in the miner's kitchen, the play explores a marriage bowed under the weight of a husband's drinking and infidelity and peers into the strange, burgeoning relationship between the neglected wife, Mrs. Holroyd, and the young electrician in whom she seeks emotional refuge. First published in 1914, The "Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd" is a bare tracing of the ways in which a marriage has gone wrong.

The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, Lawrence's first collection of short stories, was published in England in 1914 and in the USA in 1916. It contains some of the greatest stories he ever wrote: 'Odour of Chrysanthemums', 'Daughters of the Vicar', 'The Prussian Officer', and 'The White Stocking', with settings ranging from the mining community of Eastwood to Germany before the First World War. The text of this new edition is based on Lawrence's manuscripts, typescripts and corrected proofs, and is the first to remove the corruptions introduced by copyists, typists and printers. The introduction sets out the history of each story and of the collection itself. There is a textual apparatus recording variant readings and full notes explain historical references and other allusions, dialect forms and foreign words. Two important appendixes print the earliest surviving fragment of 'Odour of Chrysanthemums' and the 1911 version of 'Daughters of the Vicar'.

This casebook on D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers is the first to address itself to the full text of the novel, first published in 1992. The introduction discusses the novel's composition and the range of approaches adopted by critics since its original publication in 1913. The nine essays that follow demonstrate the full extent of the contemporary critical response, from studies of narrative technique to psychoanalytic and gender-based analysis, and set the critical agenda for its study in the twenty-first century. This collection also reproduces excerpts from Lawrence's letters relating to Sons and Lovers, along with a full transcription of Alfred Booth Kuttner's 1916 Freudian analysis of the work.

D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider is an illuminating and clear-sighted portrait of one of the twentieth century's most brilliant, radical and misunderstood writers. John Worthen follows Lawrence's from his awkward and intense youth in Nottinghamshire, through his turbulent relationship with Frieda and the years of exile abroad to his premature death at the age of 44. His account is an intimate and absolutely compelling reappraisal of a man who believed himself to be an outsider, in angry revolt against his class, culture and country, and who was engaged in a furious commitment to his writing and a passionate struggle to live according to his beliefs.

This collection of short pieces (mostly unpublished, mostly lectures) represents work done between 1994 and 2008 by John Worthen, now Emeritus Professor at the University of Nottingham and its Professor of D. H. Lawrence Studies, 1994-2003. They range between his research into the manuscript of D. H. Lawrence's story New Eve and Old Adam in Tulsa, to his farewell lecture (Ways of Saying Goodbye) at the University of Nottingham. Brief introductions recall the original occasions when the pieces were written or given as lectures; they recall John Worthen's underlying interest in the biographical and the tangible.

Shattering longstanding myths, this new biography reveals the robust and positive life of one of the nineteenth century's greatest composers This candid, intimate, and compellingly written new biography offers a fresh account of Robert Schumann's life. It confronts the traditional perception of the doom-laden Romantic, forced by depression into a life of helpless, poignant sadness. John Worthen's scrupulous attention to the original sources reveals Schumann to have been an astute, witty, articulate, and immensely determined individual, who-with little support from his family and friends in provincial Saxony-painstakingly taught himself his craft as a musician, overcame problem after problem in his professional life, and married the woman he loved after a tremendous battle with her father. Schumann was neither manic depressive nor schizophrenic, although he struggled with mental illness. He worked prodigiously hard to develop his range of musical styles and to earn his living, only to be struck down, at the age of forty-four, by a vile and incurable disease. Worthen's biography effectively de-mystifies a figure frequently regarded as a Romantic enigma. It frees Schumann from 150 years of mythmaking and unjustified psychological speculation. It reveals him, for the first time, as a brilliant, passionate, resolute musician and a thoroughly creative human being, the composer of arguably the best music of his generation.