Author Guide · Classic Fiction
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On 13 November 1915 a London magistrate ordered 1,011 copies of a new novel, The Rainbow, to be destroyed for obscenity. Its author was a coal miner’s son from Eastwood in Nottinghamshire, born in 1885, who had trained as a teacher and published his first novel four years earlier. D.H. Lawrence kept writing for another fifteen years, much of it abroad, in Italy, Australia, New Mexico and Mexico, until he died of tuberculosis in the south of France in 1930, aged 44. His last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, could not be sold openly in Britain until a jury cleared Penguin Books in 1960. This guide covers his ten key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 10 key books · 1911–1928 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
D.H. Lawrence published ten novels on his own between 1911 and 1928. The best known are Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). Start with Sons and Lovers, his novel of a mining family in Nottinghamshire, which draws closely on his own life; the two Brangwen novels follow naturally from it.
Where to Start with D.H. Lawrence
If you want his most accessible novel
→ Sons and Lovers (1913) — a miner’s son, his mother and the women he loves.
If you want his family saga
→ The Rainbow (1915) — three generations of the Brangwens.
If you want his most ambitious novel
→ Women in Love (1920) — the Brangwen sisters as adults, and the sequel to The Rainbow.
If you want the book behind the 1960 trial
→ Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928).
10 D.H. Lawrence Books, in Order
The White Peacock
His first novel, narrated by Cyril Beardsall and set in the farms and woods of a valley modelled on the country around Eastwood. Cyril’s sister Lettie chooses the well-off Leslie Tempest over the farmer George Saxton, and the book follows what that choice does to both of them.
The Trespasser
Siegmund, a married violinist in London, spends five days on the Isle of Wight with Helena, a younger woman, and cannot face the return to his family. Lawrence based the story on the experience of his friend and fellow teacher Helen Corke.
Sons and Lovers
Paul Morel grows up in a Nottinghamshire mining village, between a hard-drinking miner father and a mother, Gertrude, who pours her ambition into her sons. As a young man he is pulled between Miriam, a farmer’s daughter, and Clara Dawes, who has left her husband. The novel draws closely on Lawrence’s own life; it was first called Paul Morel, and the editor Edward Garnett cut about a tenth of the text for the 1913 edition. In 1999 the Modern Library ranked it ninth among the best English-language novels of the 20th century.
The Rainbow
Three generations of the Brangwen family in the Erewash Valley on the Nottinghamshire–Derbyshire border, from the 1840s to 1905: Tom Brangwen and Lydia, a Polish widow; her daughter Anna and Will; and their daughter Ursula, who goes to university and becomes a teacher. Weeks after publication it was prosecuted for obscenity at Bow Street and 1,011 copies were seized and destroyed. It was filmed by Ken Russell in 1989.
Women in Love
The sequel to The Rainbow: the sisters Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, a teacher and an artist, and their relationships with Rupert Birkin, a school inspector, and Gerald Crich, heir to a coal-mining business. It ends in the Austrian Alps. Finished in Cornwall during the First World War, it was first published in New York in 1920 in an edition for subscribers only, and in London in 1921. Ken Russell’s 1969 film won Glenda Jackson the Oscar for Best Actress.
The Lost Girl
Alvina Houghton, the only daughter of a struggling Midlands merchant, trains as a maternity nurse, plays piano in the theatre her father opens, and falls for Ciccio, an Italian performer in a touring troupe, with whom she leaves for a remote village in the mountains of Italy. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.
Aaron’s Rod
Aaron Sisson, a checkweighman at a Midlands colliery and an amateur flautist, walks out on his wife and children one Christmas Eve. He drifts through bohemian London and on to Florence, guided by the writer Rawdon Lilly, a figure close to Lawrence himself.
Kangaroo
Written after Lawrence’s stay in Australia in 1922. The English writer Richard Lovat Somers and his wife Harriett settle near Sydney, where Somers is courted by a secret political movement of returned soldiers and its leader, nicknamed Kangaroo. A long chapter, “The Nightmare”, recalls Lawrence’s own treatment in wartime Cornwall.
The Plumed Serpent
Kate Leslie, an Irish widow travelling in Mexico, is drawn into a movement to restore the ancient god Quetzalcoatl, led by Don Ramón Carrasco and the general Cipriano. It came out of Lawrence’s time in Mexico in 1923 and 1924 and is the most openly political and religious of his novels.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Constance Chatterley is married to Sir Clifford, paralysed from the waist down in the First World War, at Wragby Hall in the Midlands coal country. She begins an affair with the estate’s gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. Lawrence wrote three versions and had the last printed privately in Florence in July 1928, in 1,000 copies; the full text was not published openly in Britain until Penguin’s edition after the 1960 trial.
In What Order to Read D.H. Lawrence
Only two of the novels belong together: Women in Love continues The Rainbow with Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, so read those two in order. Everything else stands alone.
Publication order follows his life closely. The early novels stay in the Nottinghamshire mining country he grew up in; in 1919 he left England and never lived there again, and the later books move with him, to Italy in Aaron’s Rod, Australia in Kangaroo and Mexico in The Plumed Serpent, before Lady Chatterley’s Lover returns to the Midlands.
A reading path
1. Sons and Lovers (1913)
2. The Rainbow (1915)
3. Women in Love (1920)
4. Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928)
Everything Else D.H. Lawrence Published
Beyond the 10 key books: 15 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Short stories and novellas
5
5 books · 1914–1930
- 1914The Prussian Officer and Other Storieshis first story collection
- 1922England, My Englandstories, many set during the First World War
- 1925St Mawra novella, England and New Mexico
- 1928The Woman Who Rode Awaystories
- 1930The Virgin and the Gipsya novella, published after his death
Poetry
3
3 books · 1917–1929
- 1917Look! We Have Come Through!poems of his early years with Frieda
- 1923Birds, Beasts and Flowersincluding “Snake”
- 1929Pansiesshort satirical poems
Travel and essays
5
5 books · 1916–1932
- 1916Twilight in Italytravel
- 1921Sea and Sardiniatravel
- 1923Studies in Classic American Literaturecriticism, from Franklin to Whitman
- 1927Mornings in Mexicotravel
- 1932Etruscan Placestravel, published after his death
Collaborations and posthumous novels
2
2 books · 1924–1984
- 1924The Boy in the Busha novel written with Mollie Skinner
- 1984Mr Noonan unfinished novel, first published in full long after his death
The years · 1885–1960
Quick facts about D.H. Lawrence
- Known for
- D.H. Lawrence is known for novels about sexuality, class and the industrial Midlands that were censored in his lifetime and helped change British obscenity law after his death.
- 1885
- Born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire
- 1913
- Sons and Lovers
- 1920
- Women in Love published in New York
- 1930
- Dies in Vence, France, aged 44
- 1960
- Penguin cleared over Lady Chatterley
- Born
- 11 September 1885, Eastwood, Nottinghamshire; his father was a miner, his mother a former teacher
- Education
- Nottingham High School; teacher’s certificate, University College, Nottingham, 1908
- Worked
- Teacher at Davidson Road School, Croydon, until he turned to writing full time
- Married
- Frieda Weekley (née von Richthofen), on 13 July 1914
- Prize
- James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Lost Girl (1920)
- Died
- 2 March 1930, Vence, France, of tuberculosis
The red mark is 1913: Sons and Lovers, the novel of his Nottinghamshire mining childhood.
How D.H. Lawrence Writes: Rewriting from the Start
Lawrence rarely revised a page; he rewrote whole books. The Rainbow and Women in Love grew out of one project he called “The Sisters”, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover went through three complete versions before the one printed in Florence in 1928.
What he wanted from a character was not a stable personality but the shifting feeling underneath. His scenes follow moods as they change within a single conversation, often with the same words repeated until they gather weight, which is why the Brangwen novels can feel more like music than plot.
He wrote from what he knew and where he was. The miners’ dialect of Eastwood runs through Sons and Lovers and Mellors’s speech in Lady Chatterley’s Lover; the later novels were written in or soon after the places they describe, from Sardinia to Sydney to Oaxaca. For writers who changed the English novel in the same years, see the guides to James Joyce and Virginia Woolf below.
Frequently asked questions about D.H. Lawrence’s books
How many books has D.H. Lawrence written?
More than thirty in his lifetime and after. He published ten novels on his own, all on this page, from The White Peacock (1911) to Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), plus The Boy in the Bush (1924) with Mollie Skinner. He also wrote short stories and novellas, plays, travel books, criticism and almost 800 poems.
What are D.H. Lawrence’s books in order?
The White Peacock (1911), The Trespasser (1912), Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), The Lost Girl (1920), Aaron’s Rod (1922), Kangaroo (1923), The Plumed Serpent (1926) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928).
Where should I start with D.H. Lawrence?
Sons and Lovers (1913). It is the most direct of his novels, close to his own childhood in a Nottinghamshire mining family, and it leads naturally into The Rainbow and Women in Love.
What is D.H. Lawrence’s most famous book?
Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) is the best known, largely because of the 1960 trial. Critics more often point to Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow and Women in Love as his central achievements.
Why was Lady Chatterley’s Lover banned?
For its explicit description of sex and its use of words then considered obscene. Lawrence had it printed privately in Florence in 1928, and customs and police seized copies in Britain and the United States; only expurgated versions could be sold openly. In 1959 a New York court ruled Grove Press’s unexpurgated edition not obscene. In Britain, Penguin Books was prosecuted under the new Obscene Publications Act 1959. The trial ran at the Old Bailey from 20 October to 2 November 1960; the defence called 35 witnesses, including E.M. Forster, Rebecca West and the Bishop of Woolwich, and the prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, asked the jury whether it was “a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read”. The jury found Penguin not guilty, and its edition went on to sell more than three million copies.
Was The Rainbow banned?
Yes. On 13 November 1915 it was prosecuted for obscenity at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court, and 1,011 copies were seized and destroyed. It was not available in Britain again for about eleven years.
Should I read The Rainbow before Women in Love?
Yes, if you can. Women in Love follows Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, the daughters of Anna and Will from the second half of The Rainbow. It can be read alone, but the family history explains a great deal.
Which D.H. Lawrence books have been filmed?
Sons and Lovers (1960, which won an Oscar for its cinematography), Women in Love (Ken Russell, 1969, Best Actress Oscar for Glenda Jackson), The Rainbow (Ken Russell, 1989) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover several times, most recently for Netflix in 2022. There have also been BBC and ITV television serials of several novels.
Did D.H. Lawrence win any prizes?
One: the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction for The Lost Girl (1920). Much of his reputation came after his death; E.M. Forster called him “the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation”.
How did D.H. Lawrence die?
Of tuberculosis, on 2 March 1930, at Villa Robermond in Vence in the south of France. He was 44.
Footnotes
- D. H. Lawrence — Wikipedia
- R v Penguin Books Ltd — Wikipedia
- The Rainbow — Wikipedia
- Women in Love — Wikipedia
- Lady Chatterley trial — University of Nottingham
- D.H. Lawrence — Encyclopædia Britannica
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.”
— D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), the first line
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