The Plumed Serpent - Paperback

by D. H. Lawrence (Author)

From one of the greatest--and most controversial--writers of the 20th century comes a mesmerizing work of political imagination about a European woman's self-annihilating plunge into the intrigues, passions, and pagan rituals of Mexico.

Front Jacket

The story of a European woman's self-annihilating plunge into the intrigues, passions, and pagan rituals of Mexico. Lawrence's mesmerizing and unsettling 1926 novel is his great work of the political imagination.

Back Jacket

Written during the most flourishing period of D. H. Lawrence's career, 'The Plumed Serpent' is a novel of ritual and romance set in Mexico during the 1920s, a story both beautiful and strange. Kate Leslie, an Irishwoman, is at once repelled and fascinated by the spell of Mexico, homesick and yet unable to leave. With the ancient rites of the lost god Quetzalcoatl, she marries Don Cipriano, an Indian, and becomes wedded not only to him but also to a history full of terror and blood, to a land without shadows or mist.

Author Biography

D. H. Lawrence, whose fiction has had a profound influence on twentieth-century literature, was born on September 11, 1885, in a mining village in Nottinghamshire, England. His father was an illiterate coal miner, his mother a genteel schoolteacher determined to lift her children out of the working class. His parents' unhappy marriage and his mother's strong emotional claims on her son later became the basis for Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (1913), one of the most important autobiographical novels of this century. In 1915, his masterpiece, The Rainbow, which like it's companion novel Women In Love (1920) dealt frankly with sex, was suppressed as indecent a month after its publication. Aaron's Road (1922); Kangaroo (1923), set in Australia; and The Plumed Serpent (1926), set in Mexico, were all written during Lawrence's travels in search of political and emotional refuge and healthful climate. In 1928, already desperately ill, Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterly's Lover. Banned as pornographic, the unexpurgated edition was not allowed legal circulation in Britain until 1960. D. H. Lawrence called his life, marked by struggle, frustration, and despair "a savage enough pilgrimage." He died on March 2, 1930, at the age of 44, in Vence, France.