Lawrence Cambridge Edition

With the publication of The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, edited by Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones, and Lindeth Vasey, Cambridge University Press has produced what amounts to a superbly organized and virtual "valedictory" volume of three short stories and three novellas written by D.H. Lawrence between early 1926 and mid 1928: The Virgin and the Gipsy, "Things," Rawdon's Roof, "Mother and Daughter," The Escaped Cock, and "The Blue Moccasins." This last splurge of significant creative output by Lawrence was accomplished despite increasingly serious episodes of his pulmonary distress. In my view it remains insufficiently acknowledged today—even in this important volume—how truly heroic was such artistic achievement amid Lawrence's frequent chest pains, acute congestion, and often overwhelming fatigue. In this beleaguered but still productive period, he completed the final version of Lady Chatterley's Lover and also conceived and finished The Virgin and the Gipsy and both parts of The Escaped Cock. These two novellas understandably remain the centerpiece for this well-integrated edition, including abundant research on their origin, publication history, and critical reception. The volume also provides several unusual and provocative bonuses in its addendum section of five appendixes that Lawrence enthusiasts are sure to enjoy: three story fragments, entitled "The Man Who Was Through with the World," "The Undying Man," and "The Woman Who Wanted to Disappear." That haunting final piece of only four pages, never previously published and left untitled by Lawrence, remains the last fictional prose Lawrence ever wrote, and it was initiated no earlier than January 1929.

The comprehensive, fifty-seven page introduction is wisely organized chronologically through an interrelated discussion of Lawrence's developing thematics, doctrinal emphases, embattled personal life, and prolific communication with editors, friends, and publishers. Such a linear biographical framework mandates, for example, that the editorial commentary on Part One of The Escaped Cock (written in April 1927) is complete in itself. Part Two of the novella is not discussed in the introduction until the spring and summer period of 1928, after the relevant works written in the intervening year. The editors persuasively connect the conception of The Virgin and the Gispy to the Lawrences' farewell trip to London and the Midlands in 1925, during which they first stayed in Nottingham with Lawrence's sister Emily, and then moved to his sister Ada's in Ripley. It was during this time that Lawrence became more acquainted with Frieda's youngest child Barbara ("Barby"), who was staying with friends of her father. The actual impetus for writing this novella may have come from Lawrence's well-documented anger at hearing how her father forbade Barby to stay even for a night under the same roof with Frieda if Lawrence was present in the house.

When the Lawrences left the Midlands in late October (not knowing they would never return), they ended up in Spotorno, Italy, in November, where they rented a house reserved for them by Lawrence's publisher, Martin Secker; as irony would have it—amid the overlapping connections and coincidences that touched the Lawrences' married life—this house belonged to the wife of Angelo Ravagli, who would later become Frieda's third husband. At Spotorno and far away from the family tensions in the Midlands and in Germany, Lawrence took the unusual opportunity to spend more leisurely time with Barby, and he soon appreciated her varied athletic interests and her charmingly recalcitrant nature. The editors convincingly maintain that she was the direct inspiration for the unpredictable and beguiling character of Yvette in the novella; in the process of examining the grounds for this claim, they make a point that explains not only Barby's attraction to and for Lawrence, but also the memorable dichotomies of metaphor, morality, and tone in the work: "to rebellious Yvette, trapped in the constricting and stuffy family home, a gipsy holds out the hope of a freer and fuller life. . . . Contrary to common prejudice, the gipsy, as...