Aaron's Rod

On Christmas Eve, just after the First World War, Aaron Sisson, a checkweighman at a Nottinghamshire colliery and a gifted amateur flute player, walks out on his wife and children without explanation. He plays in an orchestra in London, falls in with bohemian artists, is befriended by the writer Rawdon Lilly, who nurses him through an illness, and then drifts to Italy, to Florence, in search of a freedom and a friendship he cannot define.

D. H. Lawrence published the novel in 1922, and Lilly is a portrait of Lawrence himself; the title refers both to Aaron's flute and to the rod of Aaron in the Bible that blossomed. Read Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and Women in Love, and see his life.

D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) was born in a mining town in Nottinghamshire, the son of a coal miner and a former teacher, and trained as a teacher himself. In 1912 he eloped with Frieda Weekley, the German wife of his former professor, and his novel Sons and Lovers (1913), drawn from his own family, made his name.

His next novel, The Rainbow, was banned, and he spent his last years travelling restlessly through Italy, Australia, Mexico and New Mexico, writing novels, poems, travel books and essays and painting. He died of tuberculosis in France at forty-four.