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The Lost Girl: D. H. Lawrence as a “Dickens of The Midlands”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Leo Gtjrko
Leo Gtjrko*
Affiliation:
Hunter College, New York 21, N.Y.
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Extract

The nervous, obsessional Lawrence, summoning mysterious gods, blueprinting Utopian colonies with himself at their head, and assuming the Christlike task of changing the course of modern history, tends to shut out our view of the other Lawrences. He was also, somewhat unexpectedly, a writer with a highly developed flair for comic satire.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 78 , Issue 5 , December 1963 , pp. 601 - 605
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1963

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References

1 The Savage Pilgrimage (London, 1951), p. 69.

2 The Golden Echo (New York, 1954), p. 245.

3 Harry T. Moore, The Intelligent Heart (New York, 1954), p. 285.

4 Portrait of a Genius But … (New York, 1950), p. 284.

5 Moore, p. 278.

6 The Dark Sun (New York, 1957), p. 90.

7 The James Tait Black Prize of a hundred pounds, awarded to him by the University of Edinburgh in 1921.

8 D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, ed. Edward Nehls (Madison, Wis., 1957), I, 600, n. 559.

9 The Lost Girl (London, 1955), pp. 63–64. All page references in the text will be to this edition.

10 Moore, p. 270.

11 Douglas disagreed sharply with Lawrence's portrait of Magnus in this introduction and wrote a short book, D. H. Lawrence and Maurice Magnus (privately printed [Syracuse?], 1925), attacking Lawrence's reliability.

12 Bennett's Anna of the Five Towns, another Midlands novel, is supposed to have been the starting point of The Lost Girl. Aldington, p. 155.

13 Toward the close of the book Alvina, now in a remote Italian village far removed from the Midlands, cannot bear the daylight: “In the end, she felt that intense sunlight had on her the effect of night: a sort of darkness, and a suspension of light. She had to hide in her room till the cold wind blew again” (p. 346). Her transposition of sunlight and darkness suggests Lawrence's imaginative and finally religious inversion of the elements.

14 Examples: “You live and learn and lose” (p. 194). “It turned out quite a good job” (p. 330).“The fierce, savage gods who dipped their lips in blood, these were the true gods” (p. 325).“The village was wonderful” (p. 338).“ … laughing at her boldly, carelessly, triumphantly, like the dark Southerner he was. Her instinct was to defend herself. When suddenly she found herself in the dark. She gasped” (p. 209).