Kangaroo

Description

English writer Richard Lovat Somers seeks broader horizons than those of fading post-war Europe, and so, with his wife, Harriet, he travels to Australia to discover for himself the people and the way of life in this vast land of opportunity. All too quickly, however, the Somers are caught up in an urgent battle for the political future of Australia. Richard struggles with his past and his personal ideology as he finds himself in a deadly tug-of-war between the mesmerising fascist Kangaroo and the feisty communist Willies Struthers. In this semi-autobiographical novel, Lawrence expresses his own gospel of personal integrity, and with vivid insight penetrates the realities and illusions of the Australian outlook - its gusty individuality, its self-conscious democracy, its open-heartedness and its volatile resentments.

Author description

David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) was born into a miner's family in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, the fourth of five children. He attended Beauvale Board School and Nottingham High School, and trained as an elementary schoolteacher at Nottingham University College. He taught in Croydon from 1908. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1911, just a few weeks after the death of his mother, to whom he had been extraordinarily close. His career as a schoolteacher was ended by serious illness at the end of 1911. In 1912 Lawrence went to Germany with Frieda Weekley, the German wife of the Professor of Modern Languages at University College, Nottingham. They were married on their return to England in 1914. Lawrence had published Sons and Lovers in 1913; but The Rainbow, completed in 1915, was suppressed, and for three years he could not find a publisher for Women in Love, completed in 1917. After the war, Lawrence lived abroad and sought a more fulfilling mode of life than he had so far experienced. With Frieda he lived in Italy, Sri Lanka, Australia, New Mexico and Mexico. They returned to Europe in 1925, settling in Italy again, where he finished Lady Chatterley's Lover. This, his last novel, was published in 1928, but did not appear in its complete form in England and America for thirty years. The tuberculosis which ha