In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle goes on his travels to Taormina in Sicily, where D. H. Lawrence lived
One tends to associate D. H. Lawrence with his native Nottinghamshire, although Lawrence left his mark on a great number of places. Helen Corke, for instance, even wrote a book with the unpromising-sounding title D. H. Lawrence: The Croydon Years. One of the places most indelibly associated with D. H. Lawrence is Italy, including the island of Sicily, where Lawrence was resident between 1920 and 1922, following a difficult First World War (during which he was accused of being a German spy; it didn’t help that he’d fled England with Frieda von Richtofen, distant relation of the infamous Red Baron) and, like Keats and other consumptives before him, in an attempt to find a more salubrious climate to lessen the symptoms of his tuberculosis.
