British Author Challenge June 2024: Kiran Millwood Hargrave & DH Lawrence

Kiran Millwood Hargrave was born in 1990 in Surrey. She graduated from both Cambridge and Oxford.

Her debut novel, The Girl of Ink and Stars (US title The Cartographer's Daughter), was published in 2014. She has written a number of children and YA books, and two novels for adults.

Hargrave was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.

Selected works
The Girl of Ink and Stars
The Deathless Girls
The Way Past Winter
In the Shadow of the Wolf Queen
The Mercies
The Dance Tree

David Herbert Lawrence was born on 11 September 1885 in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire. He attended Beauvale Board School and won a scholarship to Nottingham High School; he earned a teaching certificate from University College, Nottingham in 1908.

Lawrence won a short story competition in 1907 and was beginning to see some success with his poetry and short stories; his first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1911.

His writing often stirred controversy for its frank depictions of sexuality, and several of his works were censored or out-right banned. His 1928 novel Lady Chatterley's Lover was the subject of more than one obscenity trial.

In 1912 Lawrence eloped with Frieda Weekley, a married woman with three children; they married after she obtained a divorce and stayed together until his death in 1930.

Selected works
The White Peacock
Sons and Lovers
The Rainbow
Women in Love
Kangaroo
Lady Chatterley's Lover
The Prussian Officer and Other Stories
Birds, Beasts and Flowers
Mornings in Mexico and Etruscan Places

Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/123

I read most of D.H. Lawrence's books back in my late teens when I first discovered him, he was one of the first writers that I tried to collect all their works so I was a fan. I reread Lady Chatterley's Lover a few years ago and enjoyed it.

Fairly sure that I own a copy of The Girl of Ink and Stars of Hargrave's so I'll read that while I finish my May read of Imajica, haven't got far into it as yet.

Will also read Girl of Ink and Stars.

I plan to read The Prussian Officer and Other Stories.

I will be reading The Island at the End of Everything by Hargrave as that is the only book of hers that my local library actually has.

I plan to read Girl of Ink & Stars for this challenge.

Many years ago, I read and was impressed by D.H. Lawrence Mornings in Mexico...

would love to hear if anyone else has more recent thoughts.

I just finished reading The Island at the End of Everything and was very impressed with it. I would love to read more of Hargrave's books in future if I can track them down.

>8 m.belljackson: I just read it yesterday; beautiful descriptions of place, but i don't think the more anthropological aspects have aged as well.

>10 amanda4242: Thank you! It was the feelings he evoked of being there that I remember.

COMPLETED The Dance Tree by Hargrave. This is one of her adult novels and is a historical novel set during the dance plague in Strasborg, Alsace.No doubt she can write. This novel has feminist issues, anti-christianity, and sexual content.

I finished Lawrence's short story collection The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (1914). These 12 stories were written from about 1900 to 1914; all were revised for publication as a collection in 1914. About half the stories are set in the 1870s-1890s and concern rural and coal mining families. The rest are set post-1900.

Lawrence does a brilliant job of describing the natural surroundings; most of these stories are set in his native Nottinghamshire. All of the stories involve difficult personal relationships and "this horrible nothingness of their lives." (from Daughters of the Vicar). Men and women both love and loathe each other at the same time. Characters are often described as having their mind/consciousness that is entirely separate from their body or sometimes almost in total conflict--the mind feels one way, the body acts in another.

Overall I found these stories well-written but difficult, depressing and ultimately hopeless.

I read Studies in Classic American Literature by D.H. Lawrence for the British Author Challenge. Lawrence wrote this in while he lived in the United States, a set of critical essays begun in 1917. Chapters include;
1. The Spirit of Place
2. Benjamin Franklin
3. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
4. Fennimore Cooper's White Novels
5. Fennimore Cooper's Leather Stocking
6. Edgar Allan Poe
7. Nathaniel Hawthorn and the Scarlet Letter
8. Hawthorne's Blithdale Romance
9. Dana's Two Years Before the Mast
10. Herman Melville's Typee and Omoo
11. Herman Melville's Moby Dick
12. Whitman

In reviewing Wiki, apparently this review of Melville is credited in reviving his literary work. As to be expected, Lawrence saw sexuality in a lot of these writings. He reviewed the women of Fennimore Cooper and Hawthorne.

>14 Kristelh: In reviewing Wiki, apparently this review of Melville is credited in reviving his literary work.

So Lawrence is to blame!!

>15 amanda4242:, lol, Amanda. My granddaughter reads Moby Dick to fall asleep.

The July thread is up!

https://www.librarything.com/topic/361731

I read The Virgin and the Gypsy, a pretty fine work, if you can overlook the off-hand anti-Semitism evident in Lawrence's constant use of "the Jewess" and other offensive references in regard to one of his minor characters. Oddly, he doesn't seem to have the same casually dismissive attitude toward the Gypsy and his family, although of course he is using the then common and currently out-of-favor term for the Romany people. A product of its time, but still a powerful story of sexual awakening worth the relatively short investment of time it takes to read it.

The Dance Tree by Kiran Millwood Hargrave is on sale for $1.99 from multiple retailers.

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-dance-tree-4

I forgot to come back and say I completed The Girl of Ink & Stars in the first couple of days of July. I found it a good not great read for what it was.