Aaron's Rod Cambridge Lawrence Edition; Revised

by Lawrence, D. H.; Kalnins, Mara; Vine, Steven; Vine, Steven

• ISBN13: 9780140188141
• ISBN10: 0140188142
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-03-01
• Publisher: Penguin Classics

Summary

Abandoning his wife and children, Aaron Sisson leaves the mining community in pursuit of the 'life single': individual freedom, personal friendship, the 'male power' of passion and art.
Playing the flute to pay his way he travels to post-war London, where he mixes with the modern Bohemian set and finds male friendship in Rawdon Lilly. Further travels take him to Milan and Florence ('a town of men') preoccupied with thoughts on the decline of humanity from the Renaissance to the modern age. For Aaron, in his own way, is striving to save civilization.
Aaron's Rod was completed in 1921 but was then censored by Lawrence's publishers. This edition of the novel, based on the only authoritative surviving typescript, restores these cut passages and eliminates the errors of previous editions.

Author Biography

The son of a miner, the prolific novelist, poet, and travel writer David Herbert Lawrence was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, in 1885. He attended Nottingham University and found employment as a schoolteacher. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1911, the same year his beloved mother died and he quit teaching after contracting pneumonia. The next year Lawrence published Sons and Lovers and ran off to Germany with Frieda Weekley, his former tutor’s wife. His masterpieces The Rainbow and Women in Love were completed in quick succession, but the first was suppressed as indecent and the second was not published until 1920. Lawrence’s lyrical writings challenged convention, promoting a return to an ideal of nature where sex is seen as a sacrament. In 1928 Lawrence’s final novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, was banned in England and the United States for indecency. He died of tuberculosis in 1930 in Venice.