Who's who in D. H. Lawrence

📖 In novels such as The Rainbow, Sons and Lovers, and Women in Love, Lawrence sought to avoid "the old stable ego of character" for much more complex and ambiguous creations, such as Rupert Birkin and Gudrun Brangwen, who represented his interest in the "psychic-non-human- in humanity," as Lawrence once put it in a letter to Edward Garnett. In this latest volume in the Who's Who in Literature Series, Graham Holderness describes the more than 400 characters created by Lawrence in his finished novels and major novellas. Bearing in mind the novelist's own approach to his characters, Mr. Holderness tries to suggest the psychological forces at work in each of the characters he sketches, and how these forces affect the individual's relations to other characters in the novel as well as to the world in which he finds himself. The characters are described with all the depth and range which Lawrence gave to them, from obese Granny Saywell, who sits in "horrible majesty" presiding over those around her, through Kangaroo, transformed by the loss of Richard Somers' allegiance from a strong, essentially kind man to a cold and dangerous "thing, a horror," to Lawrence's powerful portraits of Paul Morel, and the Brangwen sisters and their men. The entries are alphabetically arranged, and an appendix provides a book by book listing of the characters. Harry T. Moore, an acknowledged authority and masterful biographer of Lawrence, has contributed a brief foreword.