... a text that feels as if it had tumbled out in the white heat of conviction. There is nothing balanced in Burning Man, nothing judicious, careful, or patient, which is exactly how Lawrence would have wanted it. Above all, Wilson resists any expectation that it is the biographer’s duty to resolve the dips, bumps, and tangles of her subject’s life. Instead, she makes a point of leaning into Lawrence’s contradictions, convinced that this is where the engine of his genius lies.

Wilson’s target is less a straightforward biography than a sifting of Lawrence’s legacy for what remains urgent and alive, the aim being to shed its infernal baggage in search of an abiding paradise. One threat to her Dante comparison is how remote from heaven Lawrence increasingly appears, his attachment to the physical world growing shriller the weaker his grip on it becomes. But these tensions are all part of the drama.

... an ambitious biography.

Frances Wilson, who has been quietly in thrall to the novelist since she was a student, does not grill him lightly over charcoal; not for her the righteous disgust of Kate Millett.

In Burning Man, Wilson seeks neither to condemn nor vindicate the author. Instead, she tries to understand D. H. Lawrence as a human being.

Wilson pays welcome attention to Lawrence’s poems and to his essays, travel books, reviews, and polemical pamphlets.

... vivid and unusual.

This is in many ways a superb biography.

Wilson’s new book succeeds on two levels. First, it reinvigorates the genre of biography by presenting its own thematic shape, dispensing with simple chronology and moving about more loosely in the baggy shapes of its stories. Second, it reads a great writer with real sympathy and acuteness. While I don’t always agree with her conclusions, I find the book nearly always entertaining and insightful.

The book is...a pliable construct that bends to the author’s whim, consenting to be led every which way without regard for the conventions of chronology or context. The reader is implicitly held hostage as well, dependent on the biographer’s confidence and skill to steer one through the narrative, which is usually linked by a more or less persuasive conceit. The whole enterprise is a bet against large odds and the payoff can result in an exciting, even revelatory rereading. When the form doesn’t fully work, however, this approach can seem scattershot and contrived, with any fresh insights likely to get lost amid the welter of surrounding facts and details.

Wilson approaches Lawrence with the fierce spirit of argument that he has always attracted and required.

... a revelation, proof that a great biography has little to do with the greatness of its subject.

... a remarkable and idiosyncratic work of biographical criticism, in part because of how intentionally shaped it is.

Wilson’s narrative lays bare the fascinating struggle between Lawrence’s two selves: one peaceful and spiritual, another which fantasises about shooting everyone he sees 'with invisible arrows of death'. Lawrence, Wilson writes, is a figure 'composed of mysteries rather than certainties': in this astonishing tale, rife with jealousy, messianism and blood, she meets Lawrence on his own terms, offering readers a mythology of his deeply wild and complex spirit..

Wilson’s Dantesque excursion detracts only marginally from the brilliance of her book. Her great strength is the aliveness of her writing, which constantly interweaves glowing phrases from Lawrence into its fabric.

Wilson is unusually candid about her own mixed feelings toward Lawrence.

Every page, almost every paragraph, of this book is exciting (except some of the digressions on Dante). Wilson complains that many biographies feel like plodding across a vast flat plain, whereas she is never afraid to dart off into the bushes, chasing intriguing characters wherever she finds them.

Wilson is a sympathetic but not uncritical reader of Lawrence’s texts. And her pen is exquisitely cutting.

... obliquely angled, at times perplexing.

... the feeling you get reading Frances Wilson’s Burning Man.

The best biographers appreciate trivia, too. They write books that don’t just provide us with dull, chronological exposés of dates, places and names, but which also include those seemingly irrelevant details that reveal the absolute essence of their subject, and which most of us, if we’re honest, find compulsively fascinating. Frances Wilson is one such biographer.

Wilson’s acumen, and willingness to criticise when it is called for, aids her spirited case for reviving Lawrence despite his flaws.

... [an] ambitious but flawed study.

... an absorbing, eccentric work of imaginative biography, a text that is by turns deeply revelatory, opinionated, and occasionally rambling.