The Complete Short Novels

by D.H. Lawrence

Published in one volume, together with "The Ladybird" in 1923, these three short novels reveal Lawrence exploring the new form, developing its potential and using it, above all, to advance his ideas on leadership and male supremacy. The four novellas that followed, including "The Virgin and The Gypsy" and "The Princess", achieve a far greater beauty and vitality, and in "St Mawr", set in New Mexico, and "The Escaped Cock" an extraordinary reworking of the story of Christ's resurrection, Lawrence brings to the short novel the richness and resonance of myth.

Genres: Short Stories, Classics, Fiction

624 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1923

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

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

A serving of bowel-blasted, scorched-earth, loin-shredding Lawrence magnificence, starring The Captain’s Doll, a pediophilic tale of a heartless Scottish man making a sunken aristo bend to his will; The Fox, a moor-swept up-north tale of co-dependency turned sour by a vulpine interloper; The Ladybird, a knotty yarn with a war-scarred Count awakening Daphne’s inner cynic; St. Mawr, a tale of a feral Welsh horse that sunders the union between an aimless American and a bloodless English posho; The Princess, a tale of frigidity and untameable womanly resolve and awkward sub-zero sex; The Virgin and the Gipsy, a brilliant portrayal of class stuffiness involving an infatuation with a travelling man and an unexpected flood; and The Escaped Cock, a dreadful biblical rewrite, possibly the worst thing Lawrence committed to print. Highly charged genius.

D.H. Lawrence RANKED

[Dolors · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Captain's Doll:
My first short tale by Lawrence, and admitting that I'm not much into collections of short stories, I quite liked this one.
Lawrence manages to transmit the same essence, the same almost philosophical thoughts regarding love and human relationships in barely a hundred pages as he did in his best selling novels such as "Women in love" or in "Lady Chatterley's lover".
The story of a doomed love affair between a Scottish soldier, who is happily married to an older woman, and a Dutch Countess refugee during WWI, who knits dolls for a living.

The lives of these two characters get different paths as the years pass by, but a doll taking after the Captain created for the Countess while she was in despair after the Captain's rejection to leave his wife, brings them again together for better or for worse.
Touché, Mr. Lawrence, as usual.

The Fox:
My second short tale by this genius of a man, of whom I'd have fallen head over heals for, if only I had been his contemporary...

In this story we meet two independent women, who run a farm business on their own, and who live a quiet and undisturbed life. The future that awaits them seems certain and unadventurous and their biggest problems are such as getting rid of a fox who steals some of their hens.

But one day, a young cunning soldier appears at their door, disrupting their peace and provoking strange feelings to one of the girls, who tries to fight with all her might against this new attraction, without success, and eventually, this new found passion leads to disaster.

In barely a hundred pages, Lawrence does it again. The way to describe feminine and masculine roles, the fight for independence and the need to be loved and protected, the fruitless struggle of rationality against raw feelings which come from the pit of your stomach, the disappointment of getting what you most crave for...

The selfish human nature and the saying "all is fair in love and war" we all want to believe are left exposed as mere excuses we all accept so we don't have to think who we really are. We are either hens or foxes.

I'll only say Wow.

The ladybird:

A cunning tale which explores the human tendencies to be drawn to obscure and oppressive relationships.

Daphne, wife of a fair and kind soldier who is waiting to come back home, meets an old acquaintance in the hospital, an Austro-Hungarian Count who has become a war prisoner, a tormented soul, with no hope left neither in life nor in love.

In spite of his depressing mood, Daphne can't help being attracted to him and his eccentric views, which are a contrast to what's generally accepted, discovering that she might be of dark nature as well, and finding out the real Daphne as their friendship develops into something far deeper than any of them would have expected.

I loved the last paragraph of the story and its conclusion, life or death, love or hate, finality or eternity, two faces of a same coin...

I still wonder how a short story like this can behold such philosophical subjects presented in such a simple and reachable way,

Great reading, again.


St Mawr
The tale started well, even better than the previous ones.

Mother and daughter, tired of living bluntly, without aim or true feeling for anything, find a soul companion in a rebellious horse, St Mawr. The animal is half savage and tends to dislike people socially acceptable.

As the story advances, mother and daughter, following their most deeply hidden intuition, start making changes in their lives, leaving their comfortable English manors for an adventurous and rustic American ranch.

I loved the comparison between the characters of the story and St Mawr's, the horse. Some descriptions were splendid, the glance and elegance of the horse, the battle of wills, the strength and submission... but I think it felt too short in the end. The story ends quite abruptly and the metaphor isn't quite finished.

Not his best.


The Princess

This is a good one.

All the topics Lawrence was obsessed with appear again in this short story: natural impulses against rationality, women's expectations in relationships, freedom against submission, sexuality and irrational attraction for the wild and unknown.

The Princess is a woman of 38, grown up by her father among feathers, virginal and caste, not interested in the masculine world, she is a rare bird only keen on the cultivation of mind.
Everything changes when she meets Romero, a Spanish horse rider, who never speaks more than necessary and who looks at her with a special "glint" in his dark eyes, a glance which makes her feel a queer unease at the pit of her stomach, so much as to forget her manners and her aims in life.
Romero is a simple man, with earthly needs, but the Princess has other expectations and their advancing relationship leads them to an extreme situation where they are only guided by their bodies, and when body and mind don't go along together, dramatic consequences are on store.

I adore this man, one of my most favourite authors ever.


The virgin and the gypsy

Lawrence doesn't cease to surprise me.
My seventh tale, I think, and even though the topics are essentially the same, the grace, the picturesque characters and Lawrence's magic style works out fine once again.
In this new story, we meet Yvette, a young girl of 21, with unpolluted mind, virgin of soul and body. What bigger contrast to fair Yvette than a dark, slender gypsy, already a married man with five children, but who holds her glance and dominates her independent and young soul with only his direct gaze, with his manly influence.
Impossible relationship and nothing in common, yet attraction is strong on both parts, and young Yvette starts questioning what she expects of her life.
Superb ending, romantic, poetic and almost philosophical. Everything is in the mind.

"And only then she realised that he had a name".

Another triumph. Oh yeah.


The escaped cock

My last tale by Lawrence (for the moment).
And what a finale!
In this story Lawrence retells Jesus' resurrection, and I guess most of the clergy would accuse him of blasphemy for his daring approach. Christ falling in love, Christ succumbing to temptation, Christ desiring a woman's flesh.
He couldn't be more irreverent and sarcastic, but at the same time, he couldn't be more innocent and tender.
I just love him and his writings.
I'll be reading more by him, for sure!

[Vishy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've wanted to read D.H.Lawrence for a long time. But before getting into one of his novels, I thought I'll dip into his shorter works. I have a huge book which has all his short novels, or rather novellas. So I read that in the last few days.

There are seven novellas in the collection. They range from 30 pages to around 110 pages, while many of them are around 50 pages long. Many of them have suggestive titles, like 'The Captain's Doll', 'The Fox', 'The Virgin and the Gipsy', 'The Escaped Cock'. But when we read them we can almost hear Lawrence laughing at us and saying, "What did you think? I'm a nice person. I write nice stories with nice characters. What, you thought that all these stories are going to be wild?" 😆 For example, 'The Captain's Doll' is about a doll that a woman makes, which looks like her lover, the captain. 'The Fox' is about an actual fox while visits the farm in the night to catch some chickens. 'The Escaped Cock' is about the bird which escapes from the farm.

The surprises don't end there. I was expecting the prose to be old-fashioned and hard to read – after all Lawrence wrote his stories nearly a hundred years back. But the prose look very modern, the themes are very contemporary, it feels like the stories have been written today. Most of the stories are about love and desire. Sometimes the ending of a story is frustrating, at other times it is surprising. There is atleast one incredibly beautiful passage in every story. Typically there are more. In most stories, the main character is a strong woman who typically defies convention and breaks the rules. I liked all the stories in the book, some more than others. 'The Ladybird', 'St Mawr', and 'The Virgin and the Gipsy' had the best endings. 'The Escaped Cock' is very surprising in the way it uses the story of the escaped bird as a metaphor, to describe Lawrence's own version of the Resurrection legend. The first part of that story is brilliant and is one of the finest pieces of writing in the book. 'The Ladybird' has one of my favourite passages from the book. I read the first one-third of 'St Mawr', plodded through it really, and nearly gave up. Then I started speed-reading it, and at some point, was browsing through pages to find out what was happening. It was the longest story in the book at around 110 pages, and though it started well, it was hard to read. But Lawrence shifts gears in the second half of the book and it becomes wonderful and the ending is brilliant. Unfortunately, by the time I reached the second half, I was not in the mood to read it, and so zipped through it. But I'm glad I discovered that the story improved and became much better. I'm hoping to give some space for a few days and then read the second part of the story slowly and savour it.

I loved reading Lawrence's novellas. I was surprised by my reaction, because I wasn't expecting to like them so much. But it is safe to say now that Lawrence has hit it out of the park.

Lawrence started his career as a schoolteacher and started writing full-time when he was twenty-eight. He died when he was forty-five. In that short life, he shone brilliantly like a star, defied the censors and the literary establishment and the moral police of his era, and sculpted beautiful stories like these. His reputation today rests on his most famous and controversial novel, 'Lady Chatterley's Lover'. But he was not a one-trick pony. As can be seen from these fascinating novellas.

I'll leave you with some of my favourite passages from the book.

From 'The Captain's Doll'

She : "But do you never count, then?"

He : "Well – very rarely. I count very rarely. That's how life appears to me. One matters so very little."

She : "But if you matter so very little, what do you do anything at all for?"

He : "Oh, one has to. And then, why not? Why not do things, even if oneself hardly matters. Look at the moon. It doesn't matter in the least to the moon whether I exist or whether I don't. So why should it matter to me?"

She : "I could die with laughter. It seems to me all so ridiculous – no, I can't believe it."

He : "Perhaps it is a point of view."

From 'The Fox'

"It's no good walking out into the forest and saying to the deer: "Please fall to my gun." No, it is a slow, subtle battle. When you really go out to get a deer, you gather yourself together, you coil yourself inside yourself, and you advance secretly, before dawn, into the mountains. It is not so much what you do, when you go out hunting, as how you feel. You have to be subtle and cunning and absolutely fatally ready. It becomes like a fate. Your own fate overtakes and determines the fate of the deer you are hunting. First of all, even before you come in sight of your quarry, there is a strange battle, like mesmerism. Your own soul, as a hunter, has gone out to fasten on the soul of the deer, even before you see any deer. And the soul of the deer fights to escape. Even before the deer has any wind of you, it is so. It is a subtle, profound battle of wills which takes place in the invisible. And it is a battle never finished till your bullet goes home. When you are really worked up to the true pitch, and you come at last into range, you don't then aim as you do when you are firing at a bottle. It is your own will which carries the bullet into the heart of your quarry. The bullet's flight home is a sheer projection of your own fate into the fate of the deer. It happens like a supreme wish, a supreme act of volition, not as a dodge of cleverness."

From 'The Ladybird'

"Take actual fire...This is what I was taught. The true fire is invisible. Flame, and the red fire we see burning, has its back to us. It is running away from us...the yellowness of sunshine – light itself – that is only the glancing aside of the real original fire. You know that is true. There would be no light if there was no refraction, no bits of dust and stuff to turn the dark fire into visibility. You know that's a fact. And that being so, even the sun is dark. It is only his jacket of dust that makes him visible. You know that too. And the true sunbeams coming towards us flow darkly, a moving darkness of the genuine fire. The sun is dark, the sunshine flowing to us is dark. And light is only the inside-out of it all, the living, and the yellow beams are only the turning away of the sun's directness that was coming to us...we've got the world inside out. The true living world of fire is dark throbbing, darker than blood. Our luminous world that we go by is only the white lining of this."

From 'The Escaped Cock'

"The man who had died looked nakedly on life, and saw a vast resoluteness everywhere flinging itself up in stormy or subtle wave-crests, foam-tips emerging out of the blue invisible, a black and orange cock, or the green flame-tongues out of the extremes of the fig tree. They came forth, these things and creatures of spring, glowing with desire and with assertion. They came like crests of foam, out of the blue flood of the invisible desire, out of the vast invisible sea of strength, and they came coloured and tangible, evanescent, yet deathless in their coming. The man who had died looked on the great swing into existence of things that had not died, but he saw no longer their tremulous desire to exist and to be. He heard instead their ringing, ringing, defiant challenge to all other things existing."

Have you read Lawrence's novellas? Which ones are your favourites?

[Florencia Tuñez · Rating 1 out of 5]

Terminé los primeros dos cuentos: tediosos, misóginos, los personajes femeninos parecen idiotas que giran en torno al hombre, sin ningún trasfondo psicológico interesante que lo justifique. Es el primer libro del año que no logro terminar y que me parece tan increíblemente malo.