Blackthorn Press: 164 books

In the year 1700 a large number of the population of the English county of Yorkshire attended a place of worship on a regular basis. By 2011 the national census showed that 60% of people in Yorkshire still identified themselves as Christian but that only 6% regularly attended a place of worship....

From the lonely parsonage at Haworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the Bronte sisters led a solitary life, blighted by death and the reckless behaviour of their only brother Branwell. All the girls longed for marriage and children yet only Charlotte eventually married her father's curate only to...

'Yorkshire in the Seventeenth Century' charts the events in England's largest county through the years that saw the country change from a monarchy to the beginnings of a Parliamentary democracy and argues that Yorkshire and Yorkshire people were at the centre of affairs. Written by one of Yorkshire's...

David Herbert Lawrence was the son  of a coal-miner  and a  mother from a family with middle-class  aspirations. He was a poet, novelist, travel writer, playwright, art critic as well as  one of  the most consummate short story  writers of  the  twentieth...

'The Rocking-Horse Winner' is one of Lawrence's more popular short stories with its mixture of the supernatural and it moral lesson of the corrupting nature of the love of money. But it has nothing new to say on the subject and without the central core of Lawrence's passion for what he is writing, seems somewhat trite.

Lawrence wrote ‘The Plumed Serpent’ between 1923 to 1924 a time when he was in ill health, living in Mexico and becoming dependent on his wife Frieda. The plot revolves around a movement to replace the Christian God with the old pre-conquest gods, such as Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent...

'The Man Who Loved Islands' is a haunting story of a man who tries to control his life by making his world ever smaller by moving to increasingly smaller islands. Each one proves to be beyond his ability to control either other people or his sexual desire and finally the last island conquers him....

Jack Grant arrives in Western Australia in 1882, having been expelled from his public school and then sent down from an agricultural college. He experiences hunting, farming, gold mining, fights and his first love of women. His character is forged by the Australian landscape and its hard, no-nonsense...

'Sun' is a sensual story of a woman rediscovering her sexuality through the power of the sun. But for the unexpected arrival of her businessman husband she was ready to give herself to a local peasant but is finally pulled back to respectability by her husband. But she is free to remain apart from him in the sun.

'Tickets Please' returns Lawrence to his native Nottingham during the war. The social revolution of women doing jobs previously done by men, also begins to change the relationship between the sexes and the women in the story are aggressive and wanting their rights. But are they happier for conquering...

This novella is Lawrence at his best, ironically probing the relationships between men and women. Lawrence found it all very amusing and gently mocks the upper classes who make ‘suitable’, loveless marriages and then live behind the lie. The hero refuses to play the game and asserts, ‘if a woman loves you, she’ll make a doll out of you.’

Lawrence wrote ‘St Mawr’ in the spring of 1924 and it was published in the following year. F. R. Leavis described the novella as presenting ‘a creative and technical originality more remarkable than that of ‘The Waste Land’ ‘St Mawr’ is a stallion which seems beyond control but is kept...

'Wintry Peacock' can be seen as one of Lawrence's swipes against women. On the surface, it is a tale of misdirected love or even irresponsible love, the relationship between the wife and the peacock being the most strange but it is the conspiracy of the two men in the story to prevent the truth coming...

Lawrence moves here to the world of the affluent middle classes, a world to which he perhaps aspired. The story is a touching one of a disfigured husband returning home from the war to a beautiful new wife. The thimble of the story can be seen to represent purposeless, surface beauty, which has no...