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David Ellis. Death & the Author: How D. H. Lawrence Died, and was Remembered. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xvi + 273. $39.95 (cloth).
D. H. Lawrence was "dogged by both pulmonary tuberculosis and chronic bronchitis during the last five years of his life and had plenty of time to see death coming." In Death & the Author David Ellis - the distinguished Lawrentian bestknown for Dying Game, the third volume of the CUP biography - tells the story of Lawrence's dying, his death, and the aftermath of his death (the funeral, the obituaries, the battle over the estate, Frieda and Ravagli, the battle over Lawrence 's image in the memoirs of the 1 930s). This unusual, deeply engaging book is intended for a (perhaps mythical) general audience as well as Lawrence scholars.
Death & the Author is certainly somber (although Ellis writes with a certain lightness of touch). Indeed the book aims for its readers to think not only on Lawrence but also on death itself. After all, "accounts of death may still serve some useful, exemplary function and help reconcile us to the certainty of our own." Ellis's narrative of Lawrence's dying and death also offers a sort of extended reflection on "how people respond to the news that they have an illness for which there is likely to be no cure" and on the attitude people who receive such news "might adopt to medicine, orthodox or unorthodox, and the difference between the retention of a positive attitude to an illness and what is now called denial." Death & the Author is clear-eyed and unsentimental, thoughtful and reflective, bracing and fascinating....