D. H. Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence was born in 1885 in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, the son of a coal miner and an educated mother. He earned a teaching certificate in 1908. With help from the editor Ford Madox Ford, his first novel, The White Peacock, reached print in 1911. He died in Vence, France, in 1930, aged 44.

Lawrence wrote novels, short stories, poems, essays and letters. He often took his material from his own life. Sons and Lovers (1913) is a largely autobiographical novel about a working-class family. Across his work he comes back to desire, class, and the damage done when people live only in their heads. His prose is intense and physical, and it often reads as argument as much as story.

His career was dogged by censorship. The Rainbow was suppressed in Britain as obscene soon after it appeared in 1915, and Women in Love followed in 1920. Lady Chatterley's Lover was first printed privately in Florence in 1928. When Penguin Books issued the full text in Britain in 1960, the publisher was prosecuted, and a jury at the Old Bailey found it not guilty that November. The case is still treated as a turning point for publishing in the UK. The BBC adapted the novel for television in 2015.

Lady Chatterley's Lover is a sensible place to begin, and it is the book listed here. It is short on plot: Constance, married to the war-wounded Sir Clifford, begins a relationship with the estate's gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. It shows both his frankness and his sharp eye for English class. If it draws you in, read Sons and Lovers next for his earlier, more domestic side.