The Daughter-In-Law: A Play

by D.H. Lawrence, B.K. de Fabris (Editor)

D. H. Lawrence, in full David Herbert Lawrence (1885.-1930.) is one of the most influential English writer of the 20th century. His diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism and personal letters. In his work he confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, human sexuality and instinct. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialisation. The Daughter-In-Law, (1912) written around the same time as his best novel, Sons and Lovers, explores a similar theme - the suffocating mother love that can leave a man emasculated. The story is integrated into a mighty portrayal of the 19th-century working class residents in Eastwood, the mining town near Nottingham, England with its unique colorful dialect. A young miner Luther Gascoigne has been married to the attractive, socially superior Minnie for only six weeks but their relationship is already in deep trouble. Not only does his wife find him a weak mummy's boy, but she learns that he got another woman pregnant shortly before their wedding. While Luther collapses into drunken self-pity, Minnie keeps on fighting for her man.

Genres: Plays, Classics, British Literature

70 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1912

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

[Parisa forootan · Rating 4 out of 5]

اولین تجربه نمایشنامه خوانی🥰‌
با اینکه کتاب خیلی ساده ای بود ولی خیلی به دلم نشست💜

[Ghazal_Ra · Rating 3 out of 5]

"ترجیح میدم با مردی باشم که کتکم میزنه تا مردی که باهام مهربونه چون صاحبش مادرشه."

[Nilo0 · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5
یه نمایشنامه کلاسیک روون. من از نشر رایبد و با ترجمه خوب علیرضا شفیعی‌نسب خوندم.
موضوعات جالبی زیادی توی کتاب گنجونده شده و جون کوتاهه عمق موضوعات زیاد نیست اما تامل‌برانگیزه.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

From TIA:
In Nottinghamshire, 1912, trouble is brewing in the mines – and simmering closer to home.When Mrs Gascoyne discovers an explosive secret about her newly-married son, it risks the hard-earned security of her daughter-in-law. But Minnie Gascoyne isn’t going to settle without a fight.

https://archive.org/details/DaughterI...

[شهرزاد · Rating 5 out of 5]

عروس
دی اچ لارنس
ترجمه علیرضا شفیعی نسب
نشر راپید
اولین تجربه ی نمایشنامه م بود. داستانی ساده اما در عین حال عمیق
در توضیحات پشت کتاب، از داستان به عنوان درامی فرویدی و کلاسیک درباره دوراهی عشق به مادر و همسر نام برده. وجه واضح داستان....
اما به چشم من چیز دیگه ای پررنگ تر امد. عاشق ادم اشتباه شدن به امید تغییر
در کل چون آن چنان پیچیده نیست به نظرم انتخاب مناسبی برای شروع نمایشنامه بود💚

[Martin Denton · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Daughter-in-Law was written by D.H. Lawrence about 110 years ago, roughly the same period when his novel Sons and Lovers was published. But it was not produced until decades after his death. This tight, emotionally hefty drama centers on a triangle whose points are a man, his wife, and his mother. Luther Gascoyne is a 30-year-old coal miner who lives in a small town near Nottingham in a brand-new house purchased by his new wife, Minnie. Their history, which we learn in the play's long first scene in conversations between Luther's mother, his younger brother Joe and a neighbor, is complicated: Luther met Minnie several years ago and asked her to marry him twice, but she turned him down. Minnie, who has worked as a governess for some time, came into an inheritance recently and decided to marry and, finding no one else willing, proposed to Luther, who readily accepted.

Now here's what you need to know about these people: Luther is indolent, handsome, passionate, but not too bright; Minnie is smart, independent, and deeply in love with Luther (but she shows it by picking at him constantly, trying to make him a better man); and Mrs. Gascoyne is controlling, manipulative, bound to old-fashioned ways of thinking and living, and desperately afraid of growing old alone. A volatile bunch, and when Lawrence drops in as catalyst the fact that Luther has made a local girl pregnant just a few weeks before his marriage to Minnie, count on something explosive to occur.

What's most interesting to me about The Daughter-in-Law is how modern it is. Minnie is a thoroughly twentieth century sort of heroine--self-reliant, blunt, powerful; entirely unafraid to take care of herself or to take on whatever obstacles may come into her path. (There's a moment when she's faced with the prospect of losing all of her money, and she shrugs it off, saying that she can always get a job somewhere to support herself; bravo!) Lawrence depicts her relationship with Luther and Luther's conflicted feelings for his wife and his impossibly domineering mother with a psychologist's eye, which makes the play both less delicate and more forward-thinking than its contemporaries.

He's also inserted an interesting socioeconomic subtext to the piece--which I wish he would have explored more, frankly--in which he contrasts Luther and Joe's knee-jerk adherence to a coal miner's strike with Minnie's surprising sympathy for management's position. Though he presents Minnie as having, on some level, "bought" herself a husband and then paying a hefty price for that folly, he lays groundwork, not fully fleshed out, for future serious problems to come when Luther's politics inevitably clash with his wife's.

[Anna Fitzgerald · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading older works in hard dialects is a cool challenge as a performer. I can't help but try to hack at it out loud yet often the intention of the lines is far clearer in my head. The free downloadable version on Kindle has obvious OCR issues and there was no proofer after the dump to public domain which drags reading time. Great female roles.

[Gillian · Rating 4 out of 5]

So many new dialect words to appreciate! Proof, if any were needed, it takes a strong woman to take on the son of a clinging mother.

[JCP]

Mint Theater, NY City Center, 131 W 55th, NYC

[Emily D. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some obscure play of D.H. Lawrence's that I downloaded for free on my Kindle....
A rather interesting story about a marriage and it's drama. Difficult dialect to read, and the layout in this Kindle version made it even more confusing because words were split across lines, with no regard for where in the word. The formatting was just bad.
Story was alright though. I can see why it's obscure though. Nothing to knock my socks off.