D.H. Lawrence / David Herbert Richards Lawrence

David Herbert Richards Lawrence was born in Nottinghamshire to a family of miners, and lived a childhood that seems clichéd to us because he wrote with such unnerving honesty and openness about it later, especially in Sons and Lovers. His father was a drunkard whom Lawrence hated and feared, and the family lived in often appalling poverty and uncertainty, their lives dominated by the mines and the violent anger between the parents. But Lawrence's mother was better educated than her husband, and inspired the sickly child (he suffered from poor health all his life) to begin his interest in the arts.

But for her, he might have stayed in the surgical appliance factory where he was a clerk. Prosthetics' loss was literature's gain as the gifted, intelligent, sensitive man (known by a school-friend as 'a right cissy') went to university and then on to become a teacher. Lawrence's mother died in 1910, helped in part by Lawrence himself who gave her an overdose of painkillers. By then he had had poems published in Ford Madox Hueffer's The English Review, but she did not live to see his first novel, The White Peacock (1911). By this time Lawrence's health meant that he had to give up teaching, and he decided to become a professional writer. —Naxos Audiobooks