The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd E-Book

D H Lawrence

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

The NHB Drama Classics series presents the world's greatest plays in affordable, highly readable editions for students, actors and theatregoers. The hallmarks of the series are accessible introductions (focussing on the play's theatrical and historical background, together with an author biography, key dates and suggestions for further reading) and the complete text, uncluttered with footnotes. The translations, by leading experts in the field, are accurate and above all actable. The editions of English-language plays include a glossary of unusual words and phrases to aid understanding. Lawrence's second play, written in 1910 but unpublished until 1914, is an intense and powerful drama in the naturalist tradition, set in a Nottinghamshire mining town. This edition includes an introduction by Colin Counsell, a glossary of difficult words, a chronology and suggestions for further reading.

Leseprobe

DRAMA CLASSICS

THE WIDOWINGOF MRS HOLROYD

by

D.H. Lawrence

with an introduction by Colin Counsell

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Introduction D.H. Lawrence: Key Dates

The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd

Glossary

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930)

David Herbert Lawrence was born in the Nottinghamshire coal-mining town of Eastwood, the son of a miner and a former schoolteacher. After working as a clerk and a teaching assistant, he trained and qualified as a teacher himself, gaining the education his father lacked but his mother had enjoyed. His real passion, however, was writing, first poems and short stories, and then novels. Having achieved some literary fame in 1910 with his first novel, The White Peacock, he went on to develop a successful writing career, producing a string of popular works including Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920), novels that were eventually to be recognised as landmarks in twentieth-century English literature.

Lawrence’s relationship with authority was always fraught. Travelling in Germany in 1912, prior to World War I, he was briefly detained on suspicion of being a British spy. Having returned to England in the company of his German partner, Frieda von Richthofen, he was then accused of being a German spy, suspected of signalling to U-boats off the coast of Cornwall where the couple lived. Perhaps it was this experience that prompted him and Frieda to begin what he called their ‘savage pilgrimage’, leaving Britain and travelling the world to such exotic places as Mexico, Sri Lanka, Australia and Italy, and finally settling in the USA. As he travelled, he wrote, producing acclaimed novels such as (1923) and (1926), and becoming one of the most widely read serious writers in Britain at the time. If Lawrence is best known as a novelist, however, his output was very varied: it included travel writing, literary criticism and, of course, plays. Although he wrote eight plays in all, only two, (written in 1910 and published in 1914) and (1926), were performed in his lifetime, and it was left to posterity to stage the rest of his dramatic work.