The White Peacock

Two families on a Nottinghamshire farm: a girl who marries the rich man instead of the farmer's son who loves her, a gamekeeper who has turned his back on civilisation, and a valley that is being sold under all of them. Lawrence published his first novel at twenty-five after rewriting it four times, and set it in the country he had walked as a boy. Everything he did later is here in solution, including the argument about class that he never dropped. Fifty-three plates of field and farm by painters including Constable and Clausen carry the novel's own landscape across two centuries of English painting.