David Ellis: Death and the Author: How D. H. Lawrence Died, and Was Remembered. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xvi + 273. Cloth £ 20.00

• Carly McLaughlin

Death and the Author is described by its author, David Ellis, as an ‘experiment in biography’ (p. xii). As such, it is not just a biographical account of D. H. Lawrence’s long drawn out illness and death from tuberculosis in 1930, but also a meditation on, and an attempt to put into practice, that which Samuel Johnson referred to as the ‘dignity and uses of biography’. This notion of the usefulness of biography is the premise of Ellis’ previous work Literary Lives, Biography and the Search for Understanding (New York: Routledge, 2000, p. 1), in which is argued, echoing Johnson: ‘Our times are cynical yet biographies can sometimes offer an inspiring example of how life ought to be lived.’ If Literary Lives is the attempt to expound a theory of biography, then Death and the Author is the attempt to put this theory into practice. Lawrence’s battle with and death from tuberculosis are the starting point for a series of reflections on different aspects of dying, death and rememberance. As Ellis argues, it is perhaps from the examples of others that we might draw lessons about our own mortality. Although the inevitable singularity of Lawrence’s case is acknowledged in the postscript, titled ‘On the fear of death’, the central premise remains that we are all bound together by the certainty of our death.

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