When DH Lawrence’s manuscript of Paul Morel — later renamed Sons and Lovers — was rejected by the publisher William Heinemann on the grounds that he had no sympathy for any of the novel’s characters, the author wrote a flaming reply. “Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the snivelling, dribbling, dithering palsied pulse-less lot that make up England today.”
Whumpf! That’s the feeling you get reading Frances Wilson’s Burning Man: The Ascent of DH Lawrence. The flare of a match, a man on fire, raging, crackling, spitting, consuming everything and everyone around him. Wilson too is on form and on fire. The biographer of Thomas “Confessions of an English Opium Eater
