D. H. Lawrence

'Was this what it all meant - utter, intact separateness, obscured by heat of living?' In Odour of Chrysanthemums D.H. Lawrence explores the concept of human isolation and the nature of love and relationships. This is the story of Elizabeth, a young wife and mother waiting for her alcoholic...

"Odour of Chrysanthemums" was written by D H Lawrence in 1911. Lawrence is at his best in this story, taken from the scenes of his childhood and based on characters he knew intimately. He reworked the story in the play The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd, but in this short-story version, Lawrence sees...

First published in 1915 and often ranked as one of the best novels of the twentieth century, The Rainbow is a passionate tale of desire, struggle and the search for personal freedom.

"The Lovely Lady" is a fine observation of a life - the lovely lady of the title - that thrives by sucking the life out of others. The two victims escape by a somewhat melodramatic and comical means, but in the process destroy the lovely lady and form what will probably be a dull and passionless...

"The Blue Moccasins" has the charm of looking at some eternal human problems such as unequal marriage, the waning of sexual desire, and a woman who cannot give herself wholly to her husband in a thoroughly English and local setting: the stage of an amateur dramatic society where all the passions...

"Mother and Daughter" can be understood as one of Lawrence's diatribes against women. Two women do their best to get along without men, but in the end, as Lawrence always proposed, a woman cannot be fulfilled without a dominant man, however unsuitable he may be...

"Things" takes a cutting look at two "idealistic" young Americans who travel around Europe in an attempt to give their spoiled lives some meaning, and in the end settle for suburban America, surrounded by their possessions, their "things"...

"Jimmy and the Desperate Woman" tells the improbable story of an intellectual editor persuading a working woman to live with him. We would say now "on the rebound" from a failed marriage, but Lawrence crosses the class divide and poses questions about what makes us attracted to other people. The...

"Sun" is a sensual story of a woman rediscovering her sexuality through the power of the sun. But for the unexpected arrival of her businessman husband, she was ready to give herself to a local peasant, but is finally pulled back to respectability by her husband. But she is free to remain apart...

"The Princess" of the story is a spoiled, sexless woman who is thrown in with a passionate man whom she takes into her bed and then rejects. This rejection leads to his ultimate death. Lawrence again pleads his case for the necessary domination of woman by man and shows the sterility of a life...

In "Strike Pay", Lawrence returns to the scenes of his boyhood in Eastwood in Nottinghamshire. A group of miners, liberated from work by a strike, enjoy a day out, but the hard realities of home life and mothers-in-law await their return. Tinged with good humor and the sense of comradeship among...

"Second Best" was written by D.H. Lawrence in 1912. In this delicate story of boy-girl love, Lawrence is at his best, intertwining the feelings of the two lovers with the natural world around them, the countryside, flowers, and fields, and the moles who are sacrificed to bring the lovers...

The Woman Who Rode Away is a dark, troubling story set in the wilderness of South America. What makes this story compelling is that the woman is at the end of her personal tether and the Indians are at the end of their cultural one. They seek one another out for terrible but perhaps predictable...

Yvette, daughter of the Anglican rector of an East Midlands village, is awakened to the possibilities of life and love by an encounter with a dark, handsome gypsy. Published shortly after Lawrence’s death in 1930, this short novel was written in 1926 and was a precursor to Lady Chatterley’s...

D. H. Lawrence’s homage to his travels in Mexico and the American southwest. The first four essays are products of a short visit to Oaxaca in Mexico. The following three, which include Lawrence’s classic account of the Hopi snake dance, are set in New Mexico. In the last essay, Lawrence...