David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) was born at Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, the son of a coal miner and a former schoolteacher, and trained as a teacher at University College, Nottingham. His early stories and his novel Sons and Lovers (1913) draw on the mining country of his youth. In 1912 he went abroad with Frieda Weekley, née von Richthofen, whom he married in 1914, and they visited her family in the German garrison city of Metz. After the suppression of The Rainbow in 1915 and wartime difficulties he left England in 1919 and lived in Italy, Ceylon, Australia, New Mexico and France, writing novels, stories, poems, travel books and essays; he died of tuberculosis at Vence in 1930.
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“It was chrysanthemums when I married him, and chrysanthemums when you were born, and the first time they ever brought him home drunk, he’d got brown chrysanthemums in his button-hole.”
The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, published by Duckworth in London in late 1914, is D. H. Lawrence's first collection of short fiction: twelve stories, most of them revised from magazine versions written between about 1907 and 1914. Two are set among German soldiers, the rest in the colliery villages and farms of the English Midlands where Lawrence grew up.
