D. H. Lawrence wrote about desire, class, and the body with a directness that got his books banned. He also wrote some of the most psychologically acute fiction of the twentieth century. This edition collects the four novels that define his achievement.

He is the writer whom respectable literary culture has never quite known how to place — too explicit for the academics, too serious for the readers who want explicit. Lawrence was neither pornographer nor sage, which is perhaps why he irritates both camps equally. He was a novelist of unusual precision about the things people don't say in public: the violence inside ordinary marriages, the class contempt that runs beneath English politeness, the way industrial modernity was dismantling something in human beings that had no name yet.

Sons and Lovers (1913) is the novel of formation — a young man in a Nottinghamshire mining town, caught between a possessive mother and his own need to escape. It remains one of the most honest accounts of the psychic cost of class aspiration ever written.

The Rainbow (1915) — banned in Britain the year of its publication — follows three generations of the Brangwen family across fifty years of English history, mapping the transformation of rural England and the increasing impossibility of finding a meaningful life within it. It was prosecuted for obscenity. What it is, is serious.

Women in Love (1920) — Lawrence's own favourite of his novels — takes the two sisters from The Rainbow into the world of the Edwardian avant-garde, money, and modern lovelessness. The relationship between Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich, conducted in parallel with the women's relationships, is one of the most complex portraits of male friendship and rivalry in modern fiction.

Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) — banned in the UK until 1960, the subject of the most famous obscenity trial in English literary history — is not, despite its reputation, primarily a novel about sex. It is a novel about England: the paralysed aristocracy, the industrial devastation of the Midlands, and a woman's decision to choose life over respectability.

✦ The complete, unabridged texts of all four novels — Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley's Lover — nothing condensed or omitted, together with two original critical afterwords and a biographical essay by Henry Bugalho.

This edition also includes:

✦ The Dark Labyrinth: A Critical Reading of Lawrence's Major Novels — a sustained critical analysis of the four novels as a unified project: the recurring structures of desire and power, the evolving relationship between body and class, and what Lawrence understood about modernity that his contemporaries didn't

✦ Blood and Industry: D. H. Lawrence and the Tremors of His Age — historical and cultural context: the Nottinghamshire coalfields, the First World War, the obscenity prosecutions, and the industrial transformation of England that runs beneath all four novels

For readers who enjoy:

✦ Literary fiction about desire, class, and the body — written by the novelist who made all three subjects available to serious fiction

✦ Banned books and the literary controversies that defined the twentieth century

✦ Historical literary fiction set in the English Midlands, the Edwardian avant-garde, and the long shadow of the First World War

✦ The complete arc of one of the most uncompromising literary careers in modern English fiction