David Herbert Lawrence was born on 11 September 1885 in Eastwood, a small mining village in Nottinghamshire, in the English Midlands. Despite ill health as a child and a comparatively disadvantageous position in society, he became a teacher in 1908, and took up a post at a school in Croydon, London. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1910, and from then until his death he wrote feverishly, producing poetry, essays, plays, travel books, short stories, and eleven more novels, including The Rainbow, Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence travelled widely, settling for periods in Italy, New Mexico and Mexico. He married Frieda Weekley in 1914 and died of tuberculosis in 1930.