Frances Wilson is a biographer and critic. Her most recent book Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction 2016 and shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circles Award, the LA Times Book Awards, and the BIO Plutarch Prize. It was named Book of the Year in the Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, Spectator, and Telegraph, and cited by Booklist as one of the ten best-reviewed books in America during 2016. How to Survive the Titanic: Or, the Sinking of J Bruce Ismay won the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography and The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Award. She lives in London.
D H Lawrence is no longer censored, but he is still on trial - and we are still unsure what the verdict should be, or how to describe him: a nostalgic modernist, a sexually repressed Priest of Love, a critic of genius who believed in his own worst writing, an intellectual who traded the intellect for a wisdom of the very body that kept failing him; and a sceptic who told us not to look in his novels for 'the old stable ego', yet pioneered the genre we now celebrate as as auto-fiction.
In a triptych of biographical tales based on the memoirs of those who both loved and hated him, Frances Wilson presents a complex, courageous and often comic fugitive, careering around a world in the grip of apocalypse, in search of utopias and in flight from illness.
Beginning in 1915 - the year when 'the old world ended' - 'Inferno' sees Lawrence outlawed: The Rainbow banned and the remaining copies burned. Determined to live outside time, he and his wife Frieda find themselves wandering the peninsular underworld of Cornwall. In 'Purgatory', Lawrence surfaces in Italy during the postwar years where, in the company of a homosexual con man (whose biographer he will become), he sheds his former selves in the Abbey of Monte Cassino; and in 'Paradise', Lawrence is lured to the high altitudes of New Mexico by society sorceress Mabel Dodge Luhan, with orders to save the Native Americans and write the Great American Novel.
Frances Wilson returns Lawrence to his physical settings, taking seriously his conviction that the centre cannot hold, but is on the brink of collapse. We might now, she suggests - one hundred years after the publication of Women in Love - be ready to hear what he had to tell us.
Praise for Frances Wilson: Wise and witty biography ... Wilson produces glinting one-liners that pin her subject down
Passion is the keynote of Wilson's fine biography
Wilson's quirky, urgent biography, which is clearly steeped in extensive knowledge of the period, is an essential guide
Psychologically rich and wise
Deftly and stylishly told. It beats most novels with its rich ingredients
In her pursuit, Wilson often catches decisively this most elusive character, and the chase is exhilarating
Stunning ... A brilliant, giddy-making portrait ... Wilson's narrative [has] a wonderfully hallucinatory effect ... Energetic and wonderfully compelling
Multilayered and wonderfully insightful
She writes with speed, flamboyance, and constant changes of viewpoint and perspective, offset by moments of calm, shrewd analysis ... A risky, sprightly, passionate biography
Entertaining, intellectually brilliant ... Frances Wilson is just as truthful and evocative as her subject