Complete Travel Writing

Lawrence and his wife Frieda left England in 1919 and for the next eleven years until Lawrence’s death in 1930 in Vence in Southern France, where he is buried, they travelled and lived across the world with only occasional return visits to England. They lived in Europe, Australia and South America, taking in Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, Ceylon, Australia and New Mexico.
Out of these journeys came Lawrence’s collection of travel writing. The writing is gripping not only for its descriptions of people and places at a time when few but the leisured classes travelled outside of England but for Lawrence’s ability to get below the surface of a place and look for the universal in the particular.
He is concerned not just with how people lived, what they ate, how they lived, what were their politics but what their relationship to the eternal was. How did they make sense of their lives? This is as true of the Etruscans who died out hundreds of years ago and whose tombs Lawrence clambered through as it is of the Indians of South America who Lawrence came to live among.
Now, when young people travel and work across the world with admirable ease, it as well to read these essays of D H Lawrence to understand the real point of travel – not just to see and indulge the senses but to challenge our own beliefs and way of life by comparing it with others. Like all great travel writing, the urge after reading one of the books is to leave the comfort of the armchair, throw a rucksack over the shoulder and follow the paths of D H Lawrence.