The White Peacock is a novel by D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence

David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...

 published in 1911. Lawrence started the novel in 1906 and then rewrote it three times. The early versions had the working title of Laetitia.

Lawrence's first novel is set in the Eastwood

Eastwood, Nottinghamshire

Eastwood is a former coal mining town in the Broxtowe district of Nottinghamshire, England. With a population of over 18,000, it is northwest of Nottingham, and northeast of Derby, on the border between Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. Mentioned in Domesday Book, it expanded rapidly during the...

 area of his youth and is narrated in the first person by a character named Cyril Beardsall. It involves themes such as the damage associated with mismatched marriages, and the border country between town and country. A misanthropic gamekeeper makes an appearance, in some ways the prototype of Mellors in Lawrence's last novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover

Lady Chatterley's Lover

Lady Chatterley's Lover is a novel by D. H. Lawrence, first published in 1928. The first edition was printed privately in Florence, Italy with assistance from Pino Orioli; it could not be published openly in the United Kingdom until 1960...

. The book includes some notable description of nature and the impact of industrialisation on the countryside and the town. Its provincialism may be compared with the novels of George Eliot

George Eliot

Mary Anne Evans , better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist and translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era...

 and Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy, OM was an English novelist and poet. While his works typically belong to the Naturalism movement, several poems display elements of the previous Romantic and Enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural.While he regarded himself primarily as a...

.

Editions

• The White Peacock (1911), edited by Andrew Robertson, Cambridge University Press, 1983, ISBN 0-521-22267-2