On this day...

British author D.H. Lawrence died in 1930. Described by E.M. Forster as, 'the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation', Lawrence was born into a coal mining community and working class background, an upbringing which provided material for some of his early works. Having completed both education and a teaching certificate, in was in 1907 that Lawrence first gained real recognition for his literary exploits, winning a short story competition in the 'Nottingham Guardian'.

He continued to teach, moving from his childhood home to Croydon, and there came to the attention of the publisher of the influential 'The English Review', a contact which he utilised, after bouts of pneumonia left him a full-time author. Three years later, Lawrence's wife, of German parentage, meant that the pair were viewed with suspicion during the First World War, and they left the country to begin a 'savavge pilgrimage', only returning twice. Therefore, it was abroad that Lawrence wrote most of his famous works, including the highly controversial, 'Lady Chattereley's Lover', which underwent an obscenity trial, and 'Women in Love'.  Having travelled to Australia, Sri Lanka and the U.S.A., it was in France that Lawrence died, 80 years age today.

Jail bird books...

'You could be jailed for reading'. So says 'The Independent', who has collated a list of books that to read could have been a punishable offence.

• 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' by D.H. Lawrence - banned for obscenity in 1928 due to explicit nature of language and frank portrayal of sex
• 'Naked Lunch' by William S. Burroughs - banned for obscenity in 1962 due to incidents of child murder and paedophilia
• 'Fahrenheit 451' by Ray Bradbury - ironically a novel about the banning of books, the work published in 1953 is said to contain hints of McCarthyism
• 'Lolita' by Vladimir Nabokov - the Home Office instructed British Customs officers to seize all copies of the novel in 1955, due to the narrator's inappropriate relationship with a 12 year old girl
• 'Madame Bovary' by Gustave Flaubert - banned, then acquitted for 'offences against public morals' in 1857, Flaubert justified it only through the eventual death of his protagonist
• 'The Prince' by Niccolo Machiavelli - originally written in 1513, it was banned by the Pope in 1559 for promoting anti-Christian beliefs
• '120 Days of Sodom' by Marquis de Sade - frequently banned for depicitions of orgies and male licentiousness, the 1785 novel was of the typical Sade mould
• 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' by George Orwell - its highly negative portrayal of Communism led the book to being banned in the Soviet Union in 1950 by the Stalin dictatorship

On this day...

English novelist Thomas Hardy died in 1928, at the age of 87. Born in Dorchester, or what he might term Casterbridge,  Hardy showed great academic potential at a young age, yet was denied higher education due to a lack of familial wealth. Instead he gained an apprenticeship as an architect, winning prizes from institutions such as the Royal Institute of British Architects.Yet five years later, with his health in decline, he decided to concentrate solely on his writings, beginning one of the most successful literary careers in British history. The works that followed have become almost synonymous with tradegy; striking a curious mix of Hardy's agnosticism and consequential beliefs in fate, with his beloved countryside and fictional county of 'Wessex'. After the popularity of 'Far From the Madding Crowd' and 'The Mayor of Casterbridge' came the scandal that surrounded 'Tess of the d'Urbervilles' and 'Jude the Obscure'; the latter's reception resulting in his withdrawal from prose writing. His subsequent poetry, was much influenced by his first wife Emma Gifford, whose rocky relationship was apparently negated and forgotten with her death. Portraying social concepts beyond his era, he influenced later writers D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf.

On this day...

British novelist, poet and critic Ford Madox Ford was born in 1873. Born Ford Hermann Heuffer, he changed his name in 1919, due to unpopular German connotations following the First World War. War proved a continuous theme in Ford's life; he worked for the War Propaganda Bureau, producing two books and afterwards enlisted in the Welsh Regiment. The theme, not surprisingly, also ran through his literature, and inspired his most famous work, 'The Good Soldier'. The novel, originally called 'The Saddest Story' was supposedly started on Ford's birthday, to 'show what [he] could do'. Critics have praised the work, calling it, 'the best French novel in the English language' and Ford, 'one of the dozen greatest novelists of the century'. Ford is also known for his journalistic achievements. He founded both 'The English Review' and 'The Transatlantic Review'; publishing authors such as Thomas Hardy, Henry James and Joseph Conrad, and giving a publishing debut to D.H. Lawrence. Ford is supposedly the model for Braddocks in Hemingway's 'The Sun Also Rises'.

Forensic etymology?...

Physicists believed that they have found a way to identify the 'literary fingerprint' of each induvidual author. Published in the 'New Journal of Physics', the Sewdish scientists used books by Thomas Hardy, Herman Melville and D.H. Lawrence to develop a formula that would analyse different writing styles. By finding the frequency with which authors use new words in their writings, and the rate at which this drops off, the researchers were able to find distinct patterns in the works; a pattern which weas consistent for the entire works of each author. The supporters of this theory believe that it might be applied to solve disputes over authorship, and find lost works by famous writers.

Lady Chatterly's L****?...

This day also boasts the conclusion of one of most infamous scandals in literature; an obscenity case over 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' in 1960, ending in the acquittal of Penguin Books. Written by D.H. Lawrence, 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', was first published in Florence in 1928, amid huge controversy. Society's uproar was due to Lawrence's depiction of explicit sex scenes, love across class divisions and his use of previously banned language. Therefore, an edition of the novel was only published in England in 1932, yet it was one which was strongly censored. The legal case in 1960, prosecuted under the 1959 Obscenity Act, was the result of the first uncensored publication of the novel, whose modernity was still ahead of society, even thirty two years after its writing. The next edition of the novel, in 1961, therefore contains a dedication, to 'the twelve jurors, three women and nine men, who returned a verdict of "not guilty" and thus made D.H. Lawrence's last noovel available for the first time to the public in the United Kingdom.'