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D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record
This is the classic account of D. H. Lawrence's childhood and youth, written by Jessie Chambers, the girl who was the model for Miriam Leivers in Sons and Lovers. It was written and published after Lawrence's death, partly in reaction to Middleton Murry's Son of Woman. Jessie Chambers wanted to present her direct and very clear understanding of Lawrence's nature, both against Murry's second-hand psychologising and against Lawrence's own account in Sons and Lovers. Chambers effectively launched Lawrence's literary career by sending his work to the English Review. Though her rejection and what she saw as his misrepresentation of her in Sons and Lovers wounded her deeply, she was large-minded enough to write this profoundly understanding account. She had written a novel under the pseudonym Eunice Temple. The name was reduced to its initials for this book, which shows a clear firm mind and a natural gift for writing.
- GenresMemoir
222 pages, Paperback
First published October 30, 1980
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 31, 2020
The woman revealed in this biography was intelligent, sensitive, loyal, and insightful. She struggled to love a man who while a gifted wordsmith was confusing, confused, and often unkind to her. Jessie wrote the book after DH Lawrence's death. It is clear that she loved him dearly and assisted him in getting his work published as well as proof reading and critiquing his writing. He used her as the model for Miriam in "Sons and Lovers", but he misrepresented their relationship. She was a much stronger woman than the fictional Miriam. As a proofreader for "Sons and Lovers", she begged him to make some changes, but he completely ignored her. By this time Lawrence had moved on to other women. Jessie met a teacher John Wood and married him in 1915. She died in 1944. I found her writing very moving and her spirit very generous to the memory of Lawrence.
September 19, 2022
When first i read it as an impressionable young girl who had just completed reading 'The Outsider' by Camus, this memoir appeared truly touching and sensitive, though slightly sentimental. A re-read shows the genuine generosity of Jessie. In comparison with her, D.H.Lawrence appears real dwarfed, despite his so-called talent. The "Tess" echoes appear surreal indeed. Oh, yes, given T.S. Eliot's almost similar treatment of his American 'soulmate', one wonders if most 'modernist' authors had a sadistic streak in them, a theme worth a psychoanalytical treatment of their works! Or was it also a chauvinistic reaction to contemporaneous rise of woman power, by proving to themselves their prowess, at 'using and throwing' talented women?!?
September 1, 2021
Jessie Chambers was the second daughter of the smallholder of Haggs Farm where the teenage D H Lawrence became a welcome visitor because of his “exuberance, his gaiety, his powers of mimicry, his resourcefulness….his readiness to help” causing even Mr Chambers to exclaim “Work goes like fun when Bert’’s here: it’s no trouble to keep them going”.
Jessie and Lawrence became close friends, paying weekly visits to the library where they took out more books than were strictly allowed, read and discussed them earnestly. For about a decade, Jessie was the sounding board for Lawrence’s musing over, say, the obligation to use one’s talents to do good, the nature of love, or his need to be free to travel abroad, without a fixed home which was a foretelling of the course his life would take.
Sadly, this intellectual closeness aroused the jealousy of his over possessive mother, who forced them to consider the emotional aspect of their relationship. With the callousness he was to show so often in the future, Lawrence told Jessie, “I’ve looked into my heart and I cannot find that I love you as a husband should love his wife”. Yet since he could not bear to give up her company, he suggested they could marry if she wanted, but he would need to seek physical fulfilment elsewhere, or if he managed to find a woman to satisfy him physically, he and Jessie could continue a clandestine intellectual relationship. Clearly this marred their friendship, obliging Jessie to conceal the love she felt for him, until his elopement with the married mother-of-three Frieda Weekley put an end to any further relationship.
In the meantime, her distress did not prevent Jessie from copying out some of Lawrence’s poems and sending them to a publisher, when he was all for giving up the attempt to get his work accepted after several rejections. Years later, he wrote to thank “the girl (who) had launched me, so easily on my literary career, like a princess cutting a thread, launching a ship”.
Jessie was also among the first victims of his habit of including people he knew in his books without any attempt to disguise them, although in making Jessie his model for Miriam in “Sons and Lovers”, what really upset her were the distortions in the portrayal of her relationship with Lawrence. This was despite his assertion “It isn’t meant for the truth. It’s an adaptation from life, as all art must be”.
This memoir was written after Lawrence’s early death from tuberculosis in 1930. Written with great clarity, this impresses the reader as utterly authentic, insightful and moving. Along with her inner suffering over his overt insensitive agonising, she notes his love of nature, acute powers of observation, and gift for putting sensations into words.
The memoir is also a vivid evocation of life in the early C20 in the rural and mining communities of Nottinghamshire. In a world devoid of television and social media, Jessie’s father read magazine instalments of Tess of the D’Urbervilles aloud to his enthralled wife, and the family acted out Macbeth under Lawrence’s direction, “half-amused, half-vexed” when Mr. Chambers , horrified by what he had to say as McDuff, was driven to exclaim, “Oh dear, oh dear! How awful!” Yet ironically, in the awful social class divide, Lawrence’s first publisher Hueffer was uncertain how to talk to working men, clearly unaware that they could be sensitive and self-educated.
Even the comments included in inverted commas in the memoir could be precisely what was said, because Jessie first began writing an account of her friendship with Lawrence under the title “The Rathe Primrose” as early as 1911. After her final break with Lawrence in 1913, she destroyed this manuscript, and it is interesting to speculate whether she was the victim of the sexism of the day when a publisher rejected it earlier as “unlikely to be a commercial success”.
Jessie and Lawrence became close friends, paying weekly visits to the library where they took out more books than were strictly allowed, read and discussed them earnestly. For about a decade, Jessie was the sounding board for Lawrence’s musing over, say, the obligation to use one’s talents to do good, the nature of love, or his need to be free to travel abroad, without a fixed home which was a foretelling of the course his life would take.
Sadly, this intellectual closeness aroused the jealousy of his over possessive mother, who forced them to consider the emotional aspect of their relationship. With the callousness he was to show so often in the future, Lawrence told Jessie, “I’ve looked into my heart and I cannot find that I love you as a husband should love his wife”. Yet since he could not bear to give up her company, he suggested they could marry if she wanted, but he would need to seek physical fulfilment elsewhere, or if he managed to find a woman to satisfy him physically, he and Jessie could continue a clandestine intellectual relationship. Clearly this marred their friendship, obliging Jessie to conceal the love she felt for him, until his elopement with the married mother-of-three Frieda Weekley put an end to any further relationship.
In the meantime, her distress did not prevent Jessie from copying out some of Lawrence’s poems and sending them to a publisher, when he was all for giving up the attempt to get his work accepted after several rejections. Years later, he wrote to thank “the girl (who) had launched me, so easily on my literary career, like a princess cutting a thread, launching a ship”.
Jessie was also among the first victims of his habit of including people he knew in his books without any attempt to disguise them, although in making Jessie his model for Miriam in “Sons and Lovers”, what really upset her were the distortions in the portrayal of her relationship with Lawrence. This was despite his assertion “It isn’t meant for the truth. It’s an adaptation from life, as all art must be”.
This memoir was written after Lawrence’s early death from tuberculosis in 1930. Written with great clarity, this impresses the reader as utterly authentic, insightful and moving. Along with her inner suffering over his overt insensitive agonising, she notes his love of nature, acute powers of observation, and gift for putting sensations into words.
The memoir is also a vivid evocation of life in the early C20 in the rural and mining communities of Nottinghamshire. In a world devoid of television and social media, Jessie’s father read magazine instalments of Tess of the D’Urbervilles aloud to his enthralled wife, and the family acted out Macbeth under Lawrence’s direction, “half-amused, half-vexed” when Mr. Chambers , horrified by what he had to say as McDuff, was driven to exclaim, “Oh dear, oh dear! How awful!” Yet ironically, in the awful social class divide, Lawrence’s first publisher Hueffer was uncertain how to talk to working men, clearly unaware that they could be sensitive and self-educated.
Even the comments included in inverted commas in the memoir could be precisely what was said, because Jessie first began writing an account of her friendship with Lawrence under the title “The Rathe Primrose” as early as 1911. After her final break with Lawrence in 1913, she destroyed this manuscript, and it is interesting to speculate whether she was the victim of the sexism of the day when a publisher rejected it earlier as “unlikely to be a commercial success”.
November 8, 2018
The realisation that our long and in many ways wonderful friendship had actually come to an end was a very deep blow, comparable to a kind of death. I had no illusions about it. In his passing I saw also the extinction of my greater self. Life without him had a bleak aspect. I had grown up within his orbit and now that he was definitely gone I had to make a difficult new beginning. For a long time in a quiet and deliberate way I wished I had done with life. The remnant that was left looked so ugly.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews