[1] His inaugural lecture as Professor of D. H. Lawrence Studies was published under the title Cold Hearts and Coronets.
Material from this project later formed the foundation of Worthen's single-volume study, D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider (2005).
Though based in Lawrence’s hometown of Nottingham, he has researched and travelled around the world to complete this portrait of the writer.
[citation needed] In 2001 he published a group biography of the Wordsworth-Coleridge circle, The Gang: Coleridge, the Hutchinsons, and the Wordsworths in 1802; in 2007 he published a life of the musician Robert Schumann and since then has completed a short biography of T.S.
Eliot (2009), an Introduction to Samuel Taylor Coleridge for Cambridge University Press (2011), a volume of unpublished[clarification needed] lectures on D. H. Lawrence entitled Experiments (2012), a biography of William Wordsworth (2014), and a biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley (2019).