A Portrait of Jessie Chambers
Written by Ann Chambers Howard

Jessie Chambers was eleven years old when her family left the cottage in The Breach in Eastwood to go to live at The Haggs Farm, Underwood, three miles away. As she later described it, "The house was long, the line of the roof was broken by a gable window which matched the porch over the front door. The farm buildings adjoined the house and formed one side of a square. From our front door, we looked down the length of the garden which was fenced off from the crew-yard, over a croft, and into the wood that shut us off completely from the West. We had a right of way through the Warren and across the meadow which brought us to the high road just above the reservoir, and this was the path that D. H. Lawrence usually took when he came to see us."

Pictures of the Haggs can be found in The Clive Leivers Collection.

Jessie, one of seven children, four boys and three girls, had left school at thirteen in order to stay at home to help her mother look after the family. But she had no intention a being a slave to her brothers and was determined to escape from the prospect of caged domesticity into a wider life. She had a passion for reading and a romantic view of life, and would recite the poems of Scott to such great length that she often bored her brothers with her intense recitations. They would get their revenge by waiting to pounce on her as she came by and pull her hair, and then they would have to fly for their lives, for far from being a frail little country girl, she was a good runner and very powerful, and found no problem in taking on two brothers at once.

From becoming a pupil teacher at Underwood School, Jessie then went to the Ilkeston Centre to get her certificate in order to begin her career in teaching. It was a strenuous routine walking the three miles each way to Langley Mill Station from the Haggs Farm twice a day, carrying armfuls of books for her homework. Lawrence was already at the Centre and knew Jessie from the family activities at the Congregational Chapel at Eastwood. He helped her tackle the difficult problems in Mathematics, Geometry, Algebra and French, and together in the little alcove at the kitchen at the Haggs they would read Dostoevsky, Anatole France, Hardy and Tolstoy. My father David was the youngest member of the Chambers family and can remember his mother being rather alarmed when Jessie and Bert began to read Darwin and Huxley; she thought it was rather improper that they should be reading books like that. But in spite of this, during these years 1904 - 1910 she welcomed him, as did the other members of the family, into their home, and treated him as a much loved, but brilliant, son.

Lawrence taught them to sing songs and to dance, but above all my father remembers the marvellous charades which they used to play at Christmas. Bert Lawrence would sit on a chair on the parlour table pretending to be Pharaoh, and Alan, the eldest Chambers boy would be Moses who had to beg Pharaoh to let the children of Israel go to the Promised Land. But Bert would jump up and down on his chair on the table with his voice rising to a shriek screaming that he would never let his children go. Young as he was, my father could see the sudden ruthless cruel streak in Lawrence's nature which later was to bring such hurt and grief to the family, particularly of course to Jessie.

The relationship between Jessie and Bert within the embrace of the family was obviously ripening. They spent a great deal of time together working and reading, walking through the fields and woods, talking and discussing. Jessie was interested in everything, to such a degree that her intensity of perception almost amounted to a form of worship. She felt that her own appreciation of beauty, of poetry, of people, and of her own sorrows amounted to something far greater than anyone else had ever experienced. Her depth of felling was a great stimulation to Lawrence, who with his naturally sensitive mind was roused to critical and creative consciousness by her. He himself said later, "You were the anvil on which I hammered myself out."

As well as launching him onto the first rungs of his literary career, she was also deeply in love with him. She helped and encouraged him in every way, reading and correcting his writings, giving him the deeply spiritual support which was denied him by his own family. It was natural, therefore, that strong jealousies were aroused in his own mother, who was very possessive of her son, and the inevitable conflict of feelings began to be awakened in Lawrence's own mind.

It was at this time too that Lawrence began to kick against his puritanical non-conformist upbringing and the strong influence which the Chapel had on them all. An inner rage and feeling of rebellion began to be evident in his behaviour and in the writing of his second novel 'Sons and Lovers'. Although by now he was teaching in Croydon, earning the princely sum of £195 a year, he was still sending the manuscripts of 'Sons and Lovers' to 'Miriam' for her proof reading and correction. The ruthless streak in his nature now began to emerge and halfway through the book Jessie became increasingly alarmed and bewildered by his cruel treatment of people whom they knew. He began to include people, episodes and attitudes which were quite foreign to their nature and to their previous behaviour and experience. She became deeply hurt that he had not only betrayed her but had been false to his own outstanding intellectual genius. She felt that he had prostituted his art and allowed his 'daemon' to get the better of him. My father remembered watching her as she read the manuscripts, writing her comments carefully at the side before sending them back to him. Lawrence rejected her advice completely, insisting on including all the things which she had begged him to alter or omit. He continued to send her the manuscripts, asking for advice which she in her anguish repeatedly gave, only to be continually ignored. Is it the privilege of the artist, not merely to sacrifice a person, but to submit the method of sacrifice to the victim and to ask the victim where she thinks the knife might fall?

As my father says, this is what it amounted to, and in the case of Miriam' it was a very terrible experience. In a letter to her close friend, Helen Corke, Jessie says, "If he doesn't leave me alone I fear I shall lose my mind." She finally sent his last letter back unopened, the last tragic gesture of perhaps the greatest dramatic experience in Jessie's life. Fortunately, being of stout farming stock, in time Jessie began to recover from her traumatic experience with Lawrence, and found in Jack Wood, also a farmer's son and schoolmaster, the love and loyalty she so longed for. He was just the right man for her. Worshiping her as he did, she could mold him, make him do and think and say what she wanted him to do, yet he would think it was himself speaking and all the time it was she who spoke.

In spite of having no children, Jessie and Jack had a very happy marriage lasting twenty-nine years until her death in 1944. In 1928, when Lawrence wrote to my father he hesitated to show the letter to Jessie for fear of affecting the happiness which she enjoyed at last. After she did eventually see it, she was deeply moved and began then to write her own account of her friendship with Lawrence which she called "E. T. Jessie Chambers, A Personal Record." Lawrence was still very near the surface of her consciousness, but writing the book seemed to help to lay the ghost of that unhappy episode in her life.

After her marriage to Jack Wood in 1915, she studied Russian and had many literary friends. She was a passionate socialist and pacifist, never doubting the rightness of her convictions which she arrived at as though by the guidance of an inner light. She was regarded by her husband and neighbors as a saintly woman, always engaged in good works, as a woman out of the ordinary.

Perhaps as Jessie grew older, she would look back to the happy years which she spent with her family at the Haggs. Her older sister May writes in her memoir of the problem they had learning to dance on the kitchen floor in the farm cottage. She writes, "as we slowly grew more adept, we complained that our kitchen floor was too small for us all to be able to dance together, but Bert dismissed the notion: 'Father says you should be able to dance on a threepenny bit, come on, now, and everybody sing.' So we sang and danced, and laughed, and enjoyed it all."

From "Haggs Farm, The Chambers Family and D. H. Lawrence", 1997