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50 free D. H. Lawrence trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
D. H. Lawrence was banned, burned, raided, deported and put on trial thirty years after his death, and this quiz follows the whole scandalous, restless life. It opens in Eastwood with a barely literate miner father and a schoolteacher mother, the scholarship to Nottingham High School, the Croydon classroom, Jessie Chambers and Ford Madox Ford, and the March afternoon in 1912 when he met his professor's German wife and ran off with her within weeks. The novels get their due: Paul Morel and the working title of Sons and Lovers, the Brangwens and the 1,011 copies of The Rainbow burnt at Bow Street, the sisters of Women in Love and the naked wrestling of Ken Russell's film, Kangaroo written in six weeks in Australia, The Plumed Serpent, the ranch Frieda swapped for a manuscript, and Lady Chatterley's Lover from Pino Orioli's Florence print shop to the Old Bailey, the wife-or-servants question and 200,000 copies sold in a day. Then the poems, the seized paintings, tuberculosis in Vence, the phoenix headstone and the ashes that may or may not be in a block of concrete in New Mexico. Easy questions suit anyone who has read one novel; the expert tier reaches Mollie Skinner, The Lost Girl's prize and the pseudonymous school textbook. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Lawrence, his books and the 1960 trial, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What did the initials D. H. stand for in D. H. Lawrence's name?
David Herbert
He was born on 11 September 1885 and died on 2 March 1930, aged 44.
Q 02Lawrence was born in 1885 in Eastwood, a mining town in which English county?
Nottinghamshire
His birthplace is now a museum, and a painted 'Blue Line Trail' links three of his childhood homes.
Q 03What was the occupation of Lawrence's father, Arthur?
Coal miner
His mother Lydia had trained for the classroom; the gap between them shaped Sons and Lovers.
Q 04Lawrence became the first local pupil to win a county council scholarship to which institution in 1898?
Nottingham High School
He left in 1901 and briefly worked as a clerk in a surgical-appliance factory before pneumonia ended that job.
Q 05Before becoming a full-time writer, Lawrence worked in which profession, including a spell in Croydon?
Teacher
He earned a teaching certificate from University College, Nottingham, in 1908.
Q 06Which Haggs Farm friend sent Lawrence's early poems to Ford Madox Ford and inspired 'Miriam'?
Jessie Chambers
Ford, then editing The English Review, gave Lawrence his first real break.
Q 07What was the title of Lawrence's first novel, published in 1911?
The White Peacock
Its working title was Laetitia; it is set in Nethermere, a fictionalised Eastwood.
Q 08In March 1912 Lawrence met the woman he would spend the rest of his life with; who was she?
Frieda Weekley
Six years his senior and married to his former professor Ernest Weekley, she left her three children to elope with him.
Q 09Frieda's husband Ernest Weekley had taught Lawrence which subject at University College, Nottingham?
Modern languages
She was six years older than Lawrence and the mother of three young children.
Q 10Frieda Lawrence was born into which German noble family?
Von Richthofen
She was born in Metz in 1879 and later married Lawrence on 13 July 1914, weeks before the war.
Q 11Soon after eloping to Germany in 1912, Lawrence was briefly arrested near Metz as a suspected what?
A British spy
Frieda's father, an army officer, intervened to get him released.
Q 12Sons and Lovers (1913) centres on which young man torn between his mother and two lovers?
Paul Morel
The Modern Library ranked it ninth among the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
Q 13Which publisher's reader became Lawrence's mentor and trimmed Sons and Lovers before publication?
Edward Garnett
His son David Garnett also became a valued friend of the novelist.
Q 21Lawrence wrote his 1923 novel Kangaroo during a stay in Thirroul, a coastal town in which country?
Australia
It explores fringe politics in Sydney and his wartime persecution in England.
Q 22With whom did Lawrence co-write the novel The Boy in the Bush during a stay near Perth?
Mollie Skinner
He met the local writer while briefly living in Darlington, near Perth.
Q 23Which socialite invited the Lawrences to Taos and gave them the only property they ever owned?
Mabel Dodge Luhan
Frieda repaid the gift with the manuscript of one of his best-known novels.
Q 14The Rainbow (1915) follows three generations of which Midlands farming family?
The Brangwens
It focuses on Ursula, whose story continues in Women in Love.
Q 15What happened to The Rainbow after its 1915 obscenity prosecution at Bow Street Magistrates' Court?
1,011 copies were seized and burnt
The novel stayed unavailable in Britain for eleven years, though American editions circulated.
Q 16Lawrence originally conceived The Rainbow and Women in Love as a single work under which title?
The Sisters
He also considered calling it The Wedding Ring before publishing them separately.
Q 17In Women in Love, Gudrun Brangwen is paired with which industrialist?
Gerald Crich
The novel ends in the snows of the Tyrolean Alps and was first published in New York in 1920.
Q 18Who won the Best Actress Oscar for Ken Russell's 1969 film of Women in Love?
Glenda Jackson
The film's nude fireside wrestling scene was a landmark for mainstream cinema.
Q 19Which two actors wrestle naked in front of a fire in the 1969 film Women in Love?
Oliver Reed and Alan Bates
It was one of the first American theatrical releases to show male genitals.
Q 20Accused of signalling to German submarines, the Lawrences were expelled from which county in 1917?
Cornwall
They had been living at Zennor; he described the persecution in the 'Nightmare' chapter of Kangaroo.
Q 24What did Frieda give in return for the Taos ranch a wealthy patron offered the couple in 1924?
A novel manuscript
It was the manuscript of Sons and Lovers; Frieda later left the ranch to the University of New Mexico.
Q 25Which 1926 novel, set in Mexico, imagines a revival of the cult of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl?
The Plumed Serpent
It grew out of the couple's long stays at Lake Chapala and Oaxaca.
Q 26What did D. H. Lawrence's 1923 book Studies in Classic American Literature examine?
Writers like Melville and Poe
He rewrote it while living in the United States.
Q 27For which 1920 novel did Lawrence win the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction?
The Lost Girl
It was written mostly in Italy after the couple fled Britain in 1919.
Q 28Sea and Sardinia describes a brief journey Lawrence made in which year?
1921
His other travel books are Twilight in Italy, Mornings in Mexico and Etruscan Places.
Q 29Lawrence's best-known poem, 'Snake', appears in which 1923 collection?
Birds, Beasts and Flowers
The same volume contains his sequence of Tortoise poems.
Q 30'Bavarian Gentians' and 'The Ship of Death' are among Lawrence's most famous poems on what subject?
Mortality
They were written as illness closed in on him in his final years.