This biography of Lawrence is unlike any other in its focus on the essential character of the artist and in its synthesis of the facts of his life and thought. It is written not for specialists, but for general readers who wish to deepen their understanding of the development of Lawrence's thought and feeling over the course of his lifetime. The author blends intellectual biography and psychology to focus on Lawrence's religious nature as a shaping force in his life.

You could describe D.H. Lawrence as the great multi-instrumentalist among the great writers of the twentieth century. He was a brilliant, endlessly controversial novelist who transformed, for better and for worse, the way we write about sex and emotions; he was a wonderful poet; he was an essayist of burning curiosity, expansive lyricism, odd humor, and radical intelligence, equaled, perhaps, only by Virginia Woolf. Here Geoff Dyer, one of the finest essayists of our day, draws on the whole range of Lawrence’s published essays to reintroduce him to a new generation of readers for whom the essay has become an important genre. We get Lawrence the book reviewer, writing about Death in Venice and welcoming Ernest Hemingway; Lawrence the travel writer, in Mexico and New Mexico and Italy; Lawrence the memoirist, depicting his strange sometime-friend Maurice Magnus; Lawrence the restless inquirer into the possibilities of the novel, writing about the novel and morality and addressing the question of why the novel matters; and, finally, the Lawrence who meditates on birdsong or the death of a porcupine in the Rocky Mountains. Dyer’s selection of Lawrence’s essays is a wonderful introduction to a fundamental, dazzling writer.

This pseudo-philosophy of mine - pollyanalytics, as one of my respected critics might say - is deduced from the novels and poems, not the reverse. The novels and poems come unwatched out of one's pen. And then the absolute need which one has for some sort of satisfactory mental attitude towards oneself and things in general makes one try to abstract some definite conclusions from one's experiences as a writer and as a man. The novels and poems are pure passionate experience. These pollyanalytics are inferences made afterwards, from the experience.

Kate Leslie, an Irish widow visiting Mexico, finds herself equally repelled and fascinated by what she sees as the primitive cruelty of the country. As she becomes involved with Don Ramon and General Cipriano, her perceptions change.

This book is a study of D. H. Lawrences view of nature, his ecological consciousness contributes to his unique place within modern aesthetics. An affinity has been examined between Lawrences ideology of man-nature relationship and the classic oriental philosophies concerning nature, particularly the ancient Taoism. In Lawrences novels and essays one finds that virtually all aspects of his religious vision are anticipated in Eastern literature. His almighty Holy Ghost, for example, who is responsible for the sacred underlying unity, is named Brahman by Hindus, Dharmakaya by Buddhists, and Tao by Taoists. His duality, with its stress on the dynamic balance between complementary life-principles, is fully worked out in the Yin-Yang philosophy of Taoism.

'Frances Wilson writes books that blow your hair back. She makes Lawrence live and breathe, annoy and captivate you ... she conjures the past with such clarity and wit and flair that it feels utterly present' Katherine Rundell 'A brilliantly unconventional biography, passionately researched and written with a wild, playful energy' Richard Holmes D H Lawrence is no longer censored, but he is still on trial – and we are still unsure what the verdict should be, or even how to describe him. History has remembered him, and not always flatteringly, as a nostalgic modernist, a sexually liberator, a misogynist, a critic of genius, 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 auto-fiction. But where is the real Lawrence in all of this, and how – one hundred years after the publication of Women in Love - can we hear his voice above the noise? Delving into the memoirs of those who both loved and hated him most, Burning Man follows Lawrence from the peninsular underworld of Cornwall in 1915 to post-war Italy to the mountains of New Mexico, and traces the author's footsteps through the pages of his lesser known work. Wilson's triptych of biographical tales present a complex, courageous and often comic fugitive, careering around a world in the grip of apocalypse, in search of utopia; and, in bringing the true Lawrence into sharp focus, shows how he speaks to us now more than ever. 'No biography of Lawrence that I have read comes close to Burning Man' Ferdinand Mount, author of Kiss Myself Goodbye 'The most original voice in life-writing today' Lucasta Miller, author of Keats

60 years after Lawrence's death, the nature of his achievement is still being debated. His vision has aroused passionate interest in many countries beyond his own. As a writer in the 20th century and as one with international standing, this book presents Lawrence "in the modern world".