YOU wouldn’t know from Frances Wilson’s biography of DH Lawrence that he came into his vocation as a writer at the same time as the Great Unrest, the massive strike wave that shook Britain from 1910 to 1914.

Nor that his tortured experience of wartime England included awareness of the Russian Revolution nor, as the son of a miner, that he even noticed the Triple Alliance strikes of miners, transport workers and railwaymen in 1919 and 1921.

Wilson's Lawrence has no political awareness and this absence is a painful omission. It is typical of the class-blind misreadings that have distorted the reputation of England’s ever-controversial and first professional working-class writer.

The political orientation of Lawrence’s provocative literary output is unmistakeable. In 1921, he writes: “If I knew how to, I’d really join myself to the revolutionary socialists. I know there must be a deadly revolution very soon...”

His politics are defined by the question of how an artist can contribute to the revolution. Lawrence found his own answer, just as other answers were being explored in Moscow and Leningrad.

His forgotten play Touch and Go (1919) was written for a socialist initiative, CW Daniel’s series of Plays for a People’s Theatre. It depicts the class confrontations that lead up to a strike and follows the escalation of violence on both sides.

Its achievement is to demonstrate that a new kind of leader and a new kind of rhetoric is needed by workers to surpass the timid seekers of compromise with capital. It shows how Marxist terminology was received by working people and what the results are.

But Lawrence knew that his audience read novels as he had and were unlikely to have access to revolutionary theatre. Touch and Go was never performed but it was a workshop for his political theme: the need to define working-class leadership.

In his subsequent novel Kangaroo, he depicts the mutual attractions of both socialist solidarity and the protofascist cult of the personality.

Where his sympathies lay is in no doubt. The fascist dies in a ritual of his own making, while the real communist on whom his character was based — the Dutch IWW activist Willem Siebenhaar — remained a friend and correspondent whom Lawrence assisted to publish his own anti-imperialist works.

But for Wilson, Lawrence is apolitical, a bisexual humanist who modelled the shape of his life on the progress of Dante’s Divine Comedy. In this clunky projection of medieval Italy onto a 20th- century existence, Hell is England, Purgatory is Italy and Paradise is New Mexico.

She deploys this high-brow conceit to draw attention to minor characters — the cast-off lovers of Lawrence’s wife Frieda in Hell, the homosexual impresario Maurice Magnus in Purgatory and the troubled millionaire heiress Mabel Dodge in Paradise.

This allows her hundreds of pages of titivating speculation into sexuality in the service of what she narcissistically pronounces to be a biography with a novelist’s touch.

It is a gossipy entertainment, but it is politically illiterate and yet another disservice to Lawrence that sees him through a 21st-century lens of salacious, class-blind celebrity psychobabble.

Never trust the teller, trust the tale, admonished Lawrence. To which we might add: never trust the biographer, trust the life.

Published by Bloomsbury, £25.