David Ellis is a preeminent and prolific D. H. Lawrence scholar. Before Death and the Author: How D. H. Lawrence Died, and Was Remembered, he wrote Dying Game (1997), the third and final volume of the expansive Cambridge biography of the author. In Death and the Author, Ellis provides a less comprehensive and more reflective account of Lawrence's late years, perhaps because, as he writes elsewhere, the “outward form” of the Cambridge biographical effort was “largely determined by its two predecessors” (Literary Lives [Edinburgh, 2002], vii). This latest study is divided into three sections: “Dying,” “Death,” and “Remembrance.” The way in which Lawrence's painful death from tuberculosis unfolded, as well as the treatment of the author after his death, provides the material for what Ellis calls “this experiment in biography” (xii).

Since today “the processes of death have been largely hidden from us,” and religion no longer “provides comfort against the terrors of dying,” Ellis offers biography as a “resource” in understanding and working through the physical and psychological complexities of facing death (x). What makes this biography experimental, then, is that while Lawrence's experiences serve as the main focus of discussion, the ways in which people die and are remembered, particularly writers, form the project's larger significance. Ellis's method is informative and often moving; considering Keats's struggle with tuberculosis, for example, gives a twenty-first-century reader perspective on the ravages of the disease and the pathos of losing an extraordinary literary mind at a young age. The diverse sources that Ellis cites range from John Donne to the film The Barbarian Invasions (2003) and from comparisons that are thoughtful and illuminating to somewhat arbitrary. The observation that “when supporting actors die in the middle of a run, the show goes on because ‘that is what they would have wanted’” (210), for example, is difficult to connect with the emotional tenor of Lawrence's household after his passing.

That said, Ellis wields his wealth of knowledge about Lawrence skillfully in this relatively slim volume, and the reader unfamiliar with Lawrence's life will get a good sense of the general outlines of his biography, as well as a profound exploration of his last months and the ways in which his reputation was shaped after 1930. The book moves smoothly from the worsening of his condition in the fall of 1929 to his death and beyond while frequently shuttling back in time to illuminate the significance of a relationship or detail. Ellis's fascinating discussion of the cultural history of tuberculosis, moreover, reveals the plethora of negative stereotypes (weakness, vice, poverty) associated with the disease in the early twentieth century and before. Because “in both the official and popular mind tuberculosis was associated with sexual license” (58), Lawrence's trouble with censors and his general connection in the public's eye with matters of sex was occasionally taken to demonstrate a causal relationship between his work and physical state. In addition to his own ideas of what constituted ill health, these prejudices likely contributed to Lawrence's continual denials to friends that he even had the disease; he insisted “like a mantra” that “it was his ‘bronchials’ which gave him trouble” (23).

Ellis organizes the section about Lawrence's declining health by considering the different approaches the individual may take when facing death; he discusses alternative medicines advertised to tubercular patients, the temptations of suicide, and the comforts of religion. The ways in which Lawrence's contemporaries and fellow sufferers relied on these methods, as well as Lawrence's flirtations with or refusals of them, structure Ellis's explorations of the culture of terminal illness. This method underscores the “life force” that characterizes Lawrence's work; Ellis draws parallels between the set of beliefs behind his work and the way in which he lived these beliefs in the face of death, the way in which he “never stopped loving ‘life’, that natural rather than social world of which he was always striving to become a more integral part” (83).

Also valuable to both the Lawrence scholar and the general reader is the account of the handling of Lawrence's estate after his death. The speculation about a probably nonexistent will by Frieda Lawrence and John Middleton Murray, which seems to have influenced the legal proceedings that determined the fate of his estate, emphasizes the social weight of a dying person's wishes, even those created by those who survive him. The value of Lawrence's work and miscellany, Ellis shows, registered immediately in the publishing world, and though Lawrence was never rich in his lifetime, his manuscripts had great worth almost immediately after his death. As Ellis puts it, “publishers and literary agents gathered around Frieda like bees round a honey-pot” (172).

The concluding section of the book explores Lawrence's posterity and its circuitous route through the twentieth century. Ellis illustrates the irony of his stone in Poet's Corner, for, example, by referencing a headline about his memorialization in Westminster: “‘Dirty Bertie’ Makes it to the Abbey” (238). The facts that Lawrence's “conceptions of a woman's role in life can often sound neanderthal and his political ideas are not exactly that of a liberal democrat,” Ellis contends, have led to his present, debased critical reputation (244). Lawrence, in other words, presents a difficult figure to reconcile with our current politically inflected ways of reading, and thus we see “a gradual disappearance of his books from school curricula” (243). Death and the Author is admirable for both breaking the mold of literary biography and attempting to revitalize Lawrence studies by exploring his experience of our shared mortal fate.

In Literary Lives, Ellis contends that a responsible biographer must “have the intelligence and human understanding to draw correct inferences from our information” (18). In this very humane and restorative treatment of Lawrence's last days and what they can teach us about the experience of death, Ellis certainly fulfills his own condition.