Son and Lover: The Young D.H. Lawrence, by Philip Callow (Allison & Busby, £9.99 in UK)

Do we need yet another book on Lawrence, a writer whose reputation is now largely kept afloat by academics, and whom many young…

Do we need yet another book on Lawrence, a writer whose reputation is now largely kept afloat by academics, and whom many young people find as unconsciously comic as Mary Webb or Charles Morgan? Well, whether we do or not we are getting it, and I suspect this is not the last, either. The autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers gave the gist of Lawrence's early life as the son of a Nottingham miner, with "Miriam" as the pseudonym for his early love Jessica Chambers. We are then taken through his runaway marriage with Frieda von Richthofen, his encouragement as a writer by Edward Garnett, the friendship with the rather repellent Middleton Murry, and finally the wartime persecution of Lawrence in Cornwall which so embittered him. It is all sympathetically described, but we have been there before.