The Complete Plays

by D.H. Lawrence

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 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 The play often regarded as his best, The Daughter-in-Law, remained unpublished until 1965.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.

558 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English writer of the 20th century, whose prolific and diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism, and personal letters. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, human sexuality and instinct.

Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage." At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel. He is now generally valued as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature.
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