D.H. Lawrence and Class (NEMLA)
Pittsburgh
Organization: D.H. Lawrence Society of North America
Event: NEMLA
D.H. Lawrence and Class
In his final novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), D.H. Lawrence imagines the wife of a minor aristocrat falling in love with her husband’s gamekeeper. He wrote the novel soon after his return to Italy from what was to be his last visit to his home region in England, which was then in the midst of industrial strife and class conflict. So the impetus for the novel may well have been events which concentrated Lawrence’s mind on social class. However, the cross-class liaison in Lady Chatterley’s Lover is only one of many inter-class dealings in Lawrence’s work, clashes and crossings that reflect his own mixed-class upbringing. His early life featured a mother with middle-class aspirations and a barely literate father proudly of the working class, a mixture memorably dramatized in Sons and Lovers. Lawrence’s own class loyalties shifted over the years as his understanding of his parents deepened and his interest in the broader social issues at stake increased, but, because he was so familiar with the values and mores of both classes, he was able to produce some of the most nuanced writing about class since Dickens. Such writing encompassed his poetry, fiction, plays, and essays. It is a constant concern.
For its 2026 NEMLA panel in Pittsburgh, PA, (March 5-8, 2026) the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America invites papers that may examine Lawrence’s exploration of class in any genre and from any angle or in comparison to other writers. Abstracts of 250-300 words should be sent to the official NEMLA submission portal: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/CFP. Please also send a notice of submission and a brief bio to Ron Granofsky at granofsk@mcmaster.ca. The deadline for submission is Monday, September 1, 2025.
Ron Granofsky