Odour of Chrysanthemums

David Herbert Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885, in the coal mining town of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire. He was an extensive writer, producing novels, poems, plays, essays, and short stories like “Odour of Chrysanthemums.” He came from a working-class background but won a scholarship to Nottingham High School. He developed a love of literature and writing, which grew through his friendship with Jessie Chambers, the daughter of a local farming family. She encouraged him in this early period and sent several drafts of his manuscripts to a journal, including “Odour of Chrysanthemums.” This resulted in Lawrence’s first publication.

Lawrence was the fourth child of Arthur John Lawrence, an uneducated miner at Brinsley Colliery, and Lydia Lawrence (née Beardsall). Lydia was a former pupil-teacher—a promising student selected to apprentice as a teacher while continuing their studies—but was forced to abandon this to work in a lace factory due to her family’s financial hardship. The central relationship in “Odour of Chrysanthemums” is modeled on his parents’ lives, with Elizabeth and Walter Bates replicating the tensions between them, his mother’s frustrations at her circumstances, and his father’s alcohol addiction. In his later novel, Sons and Lovers (1913), he explores this dynamic further through Walter and Gertrude Morel (with Walter sharing the same name as Walter Bates). He develops the idea, sown in “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” of a wife whose potential is wasted through the limitations of her labor-intensive world and her marriage to an unstable man who is unable to engage with her on her level.

Several other pieces of his family history were also important to Lawrence in his writing. His Aunt Polly was widowed by a mining accident, just like Elizabeth. His brother’s death in 1901 (of pneumonia and erysipelas) was also formative. When the body was brought back to Eastwood, it was brought into the family home and placed in the parlor. This image may have informed the climactic scene of “Odour of Chrysanthemums.” This emotionally charged tableau is one that Lawrence returned to in many of his later works, including Sons and Lovers and his most widely-known novel today, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in Mrs. Bolton’s memory of the sight of her dead husband, also a collier.

This novel and others were the subject of censorship during Lawrence’s life because of their radically frank portrayals of sexuality and explicit language. There is a hint toward his later frankness around sex and the body in “Odour of Chrysanthemums” in the direct description of sex found in Elizabeth’s realization, ironically, of the emptiness of it between her and Walter. Although Lawrence was censored during his lifetime, he also received critical respect and acclaim from some quarters, and this has only grown in the years since his death, with critics such as F. R. Leavis championing his artistic integrity and moral seriousness.