D.H. Lawrence was born in 1885 in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire. He is best known as the author of Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love and the notorious Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), which was considered to be obscene and was widely banned; Chatterley was not officially legal in England until 1960.
Lawrence is the author of eight full-length plays, none of which he ever saw onstage in his lifetime (including The Daughter-In-Law, produced by The Mint in 2003). Though it seems that he never shook off the black mark of rabid literary censorship, his works remain to this day celebrated studies of human passion and desperation. At the time of his death, much of the public regarded him as a pornographer rather than a literary genius; yet in Lawrence’s obituary notice, E.M. Forster cited him as “the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation.”

Lawrence began to write plays at the same time he was establishing himself as a professional writer. In November 1909, his first works were published, a series of poems in the literary journal, The English Review. That year, he also began writing his earliest plays, inspired by his troubled childhood in a Midlands mining town.

Lawrence finished his second play, The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd by November, 1910. The play had its roots in an earlier short story, “The Odour of Chrysanthemums,” Lawrence wrote about the stormy relationship between his coalminer father and schoolteacher mother. Lawrence tried to get Mrs. Holroyd published or performed, but like all his plays, it baffled potential backers. His unconventional subject matter (working class life), rejection of standard dramatic convention, and use of Yorkshire dialect were anathema to the era’s theatrical protocol. Even Harley Granville Barker, the innovative playwright/producer who helped open the English stage to serious social debate, politely refused Mrs. Holroyd.
Finally, after a three-year struggle, Lawrence found a publisher, the American Mitchell Kennerly. Kennerly had previously published Lawrence’s second novel, The Trespasser. Once he read Mrs. Holroyd, he was eager to include it in his catalog. Accordingly, in April, 1914, the play was added to Kennerley’s “Modern Drama” series, alongside works by such leading dramatists as Ibsen, Strindberg, and Andrejev. Lawrence, so misunderstood in his own country, was the only English dramatist included in the series. In his introduction, editor Edwin Bjorkman writes:

In the hands of this writer, barely emerged out of obscurity, sex becomes almost a new thing. Not only the relationship between man and woman, but also that of mother and child is laid bare in a new light which startles — or even shocks — but which nevertheless compels acceptance. One might think that Mr. Lawrence had carefully studied and employed the very latest theories of such men as Freud, for instance, and yet it is a pretty safe bet that most of his studies have been carried on in his own soul, within his own memories.

Contrary to Lawrence’s hopes, publication did not result in an immediate production. It was not until 1916, that Mrs. Holroyd had its first production, at Los Angeles’ Little Theatre for one night only. The play was hailed as “poignant, gripping and vivid” but derided for being “repellently gruesome” in its realism. Consequently, the play did not become popular.
It was not until nearly forty years after Lawrence’s death that his reputation as a dramatist became assured. In 1968, acclaimed director Peter Gill revived three of Lawrence’s plays, including Mrs. Holroyd, The Daughter-in-Law and A Collier’s Friday Night at London’s Royal Court Theatre. Critics hailed Lawrence’s play as a major “new” discovery. The critic for The London Times wrote that Mrs. Holroyd was “a union of naturalism and ritual, which, in the depths of its grief and the dignity of its sorrow, none of the masters of ritual have surpassed, and few have equaled.”