New Biography of D. H. Lawrence

 Another find from the Brisbane Times is Gregory Day's review of Frances Wilson's Burning Man: The Ascent of D.H. Lawrence.

And while Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time were important for the way they formally mirrored the illusions of an increasingly fragmented world, Lawrence’s early novels were less aesthetically radical as they were bracingly, and symbolically, honest. Indeed, Frances Wilson, the author of Burning Man, a fascinating new Lawrence biography, believes that he invented autofiction long before Karl Ove Knausgaard and Rachel Cusk, and with a type of urgency that ushered in a new age of gnashing self involvement and wilful psychogeographic drift.

Wilson’s Burning Man feels like the most charismatic moment in the afterlife of Lawrence since Geoff Dyer’s non-memoir of Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage, appeared in 1997. The striking thing about both these books is how relentlessly entertaining they are, in Wilson’s case because of the way her excitingly intuitive scholarship sits alongside an appetite for weighing in, defending, attacking and outright laughing at her subject.

Amazon has this book here,