St Mawr/The Virgin and the Gypsy

by D.H. Lawrence

Two short novels which affirm the powers of instinct and intuition in their struggles against the constraints of civilisation.

St Mawr is a tempestuous Welsh stallion who forces Lou Carrington towards an awareness of life, exposing the withered roots of her marriage to a talentless artist

The Virgin and the Gipsy, which anticipates Lady Chatterley's Lover in theme, is the reverent tale of a young girl's emotional awakening in the elemental presence of a gipsy.

Genres: Classics, Fiction, Short Stories

256 pages, Paperback

Published October 2, 1990

About the author

David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English writer of the 20th century, whose prolific and diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism, and personal letters. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, human sexuality and instinct.

Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage." At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel. He is now generally valued as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.H._Law...

Reviews

[Jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

D.H. Lawrence writes with a passion that begs to be savoured, and with that I found myself re-reading paragraphs just to feel that beauty once again, the second time around finding more meaning within the words than the first. This was not my first Lawrence read, and honestly, although they weren't my favourite two stories, his wonderfully unique writing style was enough to for me to obtain something special from it.

My first experience with Lawrence was Lady Chatterley's Lover, and for me, that was one of the most profoundly impacting novels that I have read to date. I went in not expecting much, and I left a changed woman. It was achingly beautiful.

This book contains two of Lawrence's short stories, St Mawr and The Virgin and the Gipsy. Between the two, I enjoyed St Mawr more. I adored the sudden bursts in intensity of his words, which initially quietly crept up on me, but these made me want to re-read certain parts over and over again. There were lots of beautiful descriptions, and I loved the comparisons used to the landscape and the various beauties of nature.

D.H. Lawrence's writing is one of my weaknesses, a weakness that I'll always care to experience up to my neck in again and again.

[Zach · Rating 3 out of 5]

as with any lawrence, these two short novels show a mushy ungluing of social sodality and mannered rule. lawrence thrusts his head into the mud. the sensual world floods upward in such untethered detail "scenes" do not occur but gush into a deluge of sexual fervor and fear. on the larger scale of something like THE RAINBOW or WOMEN IN LOVE, this creates a truly twisting sensation of space ripping itself apart with the claws of eroticism, but here, it feels inarguably a little flatter. less moving. beautiful as the system of all maleness enshrined in a horse is (he takes no interest in mares), as effervescent as the gypsy and his beloved fighting off a flood feels -- the brevity and outlines of character prevent the sublimity from reaching its fever pitch.

still, i will always love drowning in the grassy mudslide of a lawrence novel anytime.

[Liam · Rating 3 out of 5]

D. H. Lawrence wants to be a twenty something horse girl so bad. Like for once can he not write about women rejecting modernity to go run around with a foreign man

[Zachary Ngow · Rating 4 out of 5]

'St. Mawr' is the book where, halfway through writing it, Lawrence spat blood and continued his descent into consumption. This is also the book the F.R. Leavis thinks is more important than 'The Wasteland'. Preposterous. On the other hand, Graham Hough senses a sort of inauthenticity in it. Most Lawrence critics do seem to rate this highly.

Lou (Lady Carrington) and her wealthy mother Mrs. Witt are living in England amongst superficial, fashionable people. Lou's husband, Henry (Rico) Carrington is one of them. Her mother detests him. Lou awakens from her false life, and her attachment to Rico, by seeing the darkness in the stallion St. Mawr.

"Almost like a god looking at her terribly out of the everlasting dark, she had felt the eyes of that horse; great, glowing, fearsome eyes, arched with a question, and containing a white blad of light like a threat... He was some splendid demon, and she must worship him."

This sort of dark, unconscious, power is in other stories like The Ladybird (a favourite of mine) and You Touched Me.

Meanwhile, her mother spends her days watching funerals out of her window. Lou and her mother have a quite fascinating conversation about their lives, both longing for something real and rejecting the falseness they see. There is more talk about Pan, which St. Mawr is a manifestation of. Some things happen, and then St. Mawr seriously harms Rico. At the same time Lou sees the evil in Modernity:

"And she had a vision, a vision of evil. Or not strictly a vision. She became aware of evil, evil, evil, rolling in great waves over the earth. Always she had thought there was no such thing - only a mere negation of good. Now, like an ocean to whose surface she had risen, she saw the dark-grey waves of evil rearing in a great tide.

And it had swept mankind away without mankind's knowing. It had caught up the nations as the rising ocean might lift the fishes, and was sweeping them on in a great tide of evil..."

Rico milks his injury for the sympathy of Flora, another socialite. The people conspire to take St. Mawr away and either kill or neuter him. Lou and her mother, along with their servants (both manifestations of a more primal Man; Lewis a Welshman with some bizzare sort of beliefs about the moon and Phoenix an indigenous American) leave to America. Before they board the ship there is an epistolary section that was quite enjoyable. Aboard the ship Lou and her mother witness porpoises and flying fish. Another piece 'The Flying Fish' was never finished but had the same imagery:

"All the long morning he would be there curled in the wonder of this gulf of creation, where the flying fishes on translucent wings swept in their ecstatic clouds out of the water, in a terror that was brilliant as joy, in a joy brilliant with terror, with wings made of pure water flapping with great speed, and long-shafted bodies of translucent silver like squirts of living water, there in air, brilliant in air, before suddenly they had disappeared, and the blue sea was trembling with a delicate frail surface of green, the still sea lay one moment ahead, untouched, untouched since time began, in its watery loveliness."

'The Flying Fish' has a darker, more fantastical tone that reminded me a bit of 'Dune'. It has a similar description of Havana to 'St. Mawr' but the story goes in reverse (from the Americas to Britain). A lot of the story of the lesser and greater "Day" is similar to the conversations between Lou and her mother about the falseness of life. Unfortunately, it peters out. A lot of it was obviously used in St. Mawr and I wonder if it was used in 'The Plumed Serpent', which I haven't yet read. 'The New Animals' by Pip Adam is one of my favourite books and 'St. Mawr' and 'The Flying Fish' remind me of it a little.

When Lou and Mrs. Witt get to America they are disappointed in the falseness that lives there too. Lou finds a ranch to buy, and a lengthy description of the land (which Lawrence himself was living in) interrupts the story before it ends with a conversation between Lou and her mother.

There are some parts of this story that didn't age well, particularly some of the things about native Americans (though I don't think it was done with hatred to them in particular). Nonetheless this is clearly one of Lawrence's best works (though I wouldn't go as far as F.R. Leavis).

'The Virgin and the Gipsy', written after St. Mawr during a time where Frieda's now grown children visited them. The two sisters of the story Yvette and Lucille live in a house with their single (and salty) aunty, father and a domineering old grandmother (referred to as the Mater). Quite a hilarious description of their dinner ensues:

"Roast beef and wet cabbage, cold mutton and mashed potatoes, sour pickles, inexcusable puddings."

The shows the poverty of life the two girls feel. The way the family eat reflects their personalities. The aunty gets a single potato and:

"Granny quickly slobbered her portion - lucky if she spilled nothing on her protuberant stomach."

Their mother who is not spoken of by her name, is a woman who has broken free. Yvette wants to do the same. She meets a "gipsy" (Joe Boswell) and later on a "Jewess". These people show her a different, more interesting way of life than the sterile English society she lives in. The story ends dramatically, maybe symbolic of the way modernity needs to be destroyed.

I thought this novella was okay. Lawrence used a sort of familiar, light-hearted style of narration that is slightly irritating. The best part was the way the family ate and the absurd way the aunty treats her nieces.

I am not sure why these two pieces were collected together in particular. They do both represent ways women break free from the stifled life that they are prescribed. 'The Virgin and the Gipsy' isn't very special (except the ending and the food description) but I think 'St. Mawr' is definitely worth reading.

[Ann · Rating 2 out of 5]

A tedious book. I didn't enjoy St Mawr. It was my first D H Lawrence and it was so full of long descriptions of repressed angst and ridiculous scenes such as Mrs De Witt asking her groom to join in a discussion as to what he would say if she asked him to marry her that I nearly didn't finish it. The heroine of the story appeared to switch constantly between naive childishness and being the only 'adult'. However, the narrative did capture a sense of a Poignant moment between the first and Second World Wars where attitudes to many things were changing: in the relationships between servants and masters, various class distinctions, both in the Uk and the USA, men and women and national traits.

[josee 💌 · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don’t hate men because they’re men, as nuns do. I dislike them because they’re not men enough:babies, and playboys,and poor things showing off all the time, even to themselves.

The last 50 pages of St Mawr were such a bore to read ..ugh oh the ennui of it all.. DH. Lawrence writes beautifully and has brought on some very interesting themes :the man/woman duel or duet , the animal /human rivalry ,nature,war and so on .. …it’s all up there with my favourite things in 20th century novels but oh boy was this really racist and so dated ..and the whole American/British clash cultures was just too boring by the end of it . Has some really neat lines but the author kept going off the rails too quickly.

[Serge]

St Mawr: Many have attempted to get away from modern civilization, both in fiction and in reality; most have had to give up, some have died. It is to Lawrence's credit that he gives a hint about what might happen to the heroine, when he tells the story about previous owners of the ranch. Even so, in the light of changing attitudes at the time, we can understand some of the heroine's motivations. As for Lawrence's philosophical passages, they range from some that I plainly did not understand ("the mysterious potency of evil") to some observations relevant to this day ("the mystic duty to 'feel good'").
The Virgin and the Gipsy: A very worthy variation on Lawrence's frequent Sleeping Beauty theme. The novella does not go into philosophical discussions, and life in the provincial village is beautifully described, as well as the stifling atmosphere of the family home.

[Cam · Rating 1 out of 5]

D.H. Lawrence is some crusty old man who writes bland writing where he goes into detail about shit no one cares about. he's by far the dullest writer I have ever read and that says alot, hes a crusty shit writer

[Hanneke Van Keulen · Rating 5 out of 5]

How else can I explain why I like DH Lawerence so much except that his writing speaks to my soul.

[Richard Clay · Rating 1 out of 5]

When he wrote the collection England my England, Lawrence was still a proper writer. Three or four years later, when these stories were written, he was an embarrassing self parody.

I'm inclined to put it down to the tuberculosis. No one's able to be a good writer - or a good anything - if their brain is starved of oxygen and that's what happens if your lungs are falling to bits.

So: this is NOT the author of The Rainbow or of Women in Love. Anyone who says it is, does that author a huge disservice.

[Neph · Rating 3 out of 5]

What was beautiful about this story (I only read St. Mawr) was how much Lawrence delved into the human psyche from different perspectives. The descriptions of landscape were mesmerising although one thing that annoyed me was that none of the characters were particularly realistic, but then again, I was born 70 years after this novel's time, so I lack cultural references. All in all a brilliant read for those who enjoy old school writing and human behaviour studies.

[Helen Perks]

a quick read. Not Lawrence at his best, but entertaining, whisks you into the world he creates.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Two disparate tales of love.