Page 246 - DENG404_FICTION

Fiction

Notes slow process of over-emphasis on the mind. In his later years Lawrence developed the potentialities
of the short novel form in St Mawr, The Virgin and the Gypsy and The Escaped Cock.

Short stories
Lawrence’s best-known short stories include The Captain’s Doll, The Fox, The Ladybird, Odour
of Chrysanthemums, The Princess, The Rocking-Horse Winner, St Mawr, The Virgin and the
Gypsy and The Woman who Rode Away. (The Virgin and the Gypsy was published as a
novella after he died.) Among his most praised collections is The Prussian Officer and Other
Stories, published in 1914. His collection The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories,
published in 1928, develops his themes of leadership that he also explored in novels such as
Kangaroo, The Plumed Serpent and Fanny and Annie.

Poetry

Although best known for his novels, Lawrence wrote almost 800 poems, most of them relatively
short. His first poems were written in 1904 and two of his poems, Dreams Old and Dreams
Nascent, were among his earliest published works in The English Review. His early works
clearly place him in the school of Georgian poets, a group not only named after the reigning
monarch but also to the romantic poets of the previous Georgian period whose work they
were trying to emulate. What typified the entire movement, and Lawrence’s poems of the
time, were well-worn poetic tropes and deliberately archaic language. Many of these poems
displayed what John Ruskin referred to as the “pathetic fallacy”, which is the tendency to
ascribe human emotions to animals and even inanimate objects.
Lawrence rewrote many of his novels several times to perfect them and similarly he returned
to some of his early poems when they were collected in 1928. This was in part to fictionalise
them, but also to remove some of the artifice of his first works. As he put in himself: “A young
man is afraid of his demon and puts his hand over the demon’s mouth sometimes and speaks
for him.” His best known poems are probably those dealing with nature such as those in Birds
Beasts and Flowers and Tortoises. Snake is one of his most frequently anthologized, displays
some of his most frequent concerns; those of man’s modern distance from nature and subtle
hints at religious themes.

Literary criticism
Lawrence’s criticism of other authors often provides great insight into his own thinking and
writing. Of particular note is his Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays and Studies in
Classic American Literature. In the latter, Lawrence’s responses to Whitman, Melville and
Edgar Allan Poe shed particular light on the nature of Lawrence’s craft.

21.2.2 Introduction to Sons and Lovers

Though D. H. Lawrence’s third published novel, Sons and Lovers (1913) is largely autobiographical.
The novel, which began as “Paul Morel,” was sparked by the death of Lawrence’s mother,
Lydia. Lawrence reexamined his childhood, his relationship with his mother, and her psychological
effect on his sexuality.
The roots of Sons and Lovers are clearly located in Lawrence’s life. His childhood coal-mining
town of Eastwood was changed, with a sardonic twist, to Bestwood. Walter Morel was modeled
on Lawrence’s hard-drinking, irresponsible collier father, Arthur. Lydia became Gertrude Morel,
the intellectually stifled, unhappy mother who lives through her sons. The death by erysipelas
of one of Lawrence’s elder brothers, Ernest, and Lydia’s grief and eventual obsession with

240 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY