Lawrence Short Stories

BOOK REVIEWS Lawrence Short Stories Martin F. Kearney. Major Short Stories of D. H. Lawrence: A Handbook. New York: Garland, 1998. xl + 218 pp. $49.00 IN HIS INTRODUCTION to this "handbook" (volume no. 1948 in the Garland Reference Library of the Humanities), Martin F. Kearney describes the work as a "reference guide... designed for those who would be knowledgeable readers of major stories by D. H. Lawrence when the store of scholarship, investigation, and appraisal is far too vast for all but the expert" (xi). Kearney has limited his primary focus to just six Lawrence stories, devoting a substantial chapter to each of the following : "Odour of Chrysanthemums," "The Shadow in the Rose Garden," "Daughters of the Vicar," "The Prussian Officer," "The Horse-Dealer's Daughter," and "The Rocking-Horse Winner." Each chapter considers the story's publication history, circumstances of composition, sources and influences, its relationship to other Lawrence works, a summary of noteworthy critical studies through 1991, and a list of works cited. The criteria for selecting which stories to include were chiefly the degree of critical attention they have attracted and the frequency with which they have appeared in anthologies of short fiction. Furthermore, Kearney asserts, these six stories were "chosen both for their consummate artistry and for the accurate cross section they present of Lawrence 's entire career" (xi). This last claim clearly lacks credibility. The first four stories all appeared in Lawrence's first collection, The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, published in 1914, though many of the individual stories had been originally composed several years earlier in versions published in various literary magazines. "The Horse-Dealer's Daughter," begun in Cornwall in 1915, revised in Sicily in 1921, and collected in England, My England and Other Stories (1922), was chosen "because it is among the very best representatives of Lawrence's writing during World War I" (xi). Finally, written in 1926 for an anthology of ghost stories but uncollected until the posthumous volume The Lost Lady and Other Stories (1933), "The Rocking-Horse Winner" epitomizes "the fabular stories Lawrence wrote in the last five years of his life" (xii). Of course virtually any selection, especially one that includes only a half-dozen out of some fifty tales, is a tacit invitation to critical dispute. Kearney himself admits that some readers will regret the omission of such well-known stories as "The Blind Man" (1918) and "The Man Who Loved Islands" (1926), while others will be surprised by the choice of 221 ELT 42 : 2 1999 "The Shadow in the Rose Garden." In addition to the two previously noted omissions, I would argue for "The Princess" (1925), "Two Blue Birds" (1926), and "The Lovely Lady" (1927), and probably for "Tickets Please" (1919) and "Hadrian"/"You Touched Me" (1920) as well. Though my additions may not meet all of Kearney's stated criteria, they would at least correct his skewed emphasis on Lawrence's earliest stories and provide a more even-handed, comprehensive view of his development in the short story form. (They would not, however, begin to address his exclusion of the novellas—e.g., Love Among the Haystacks, The Fox, St. Mawr, The Man Who Died—which represent some of Lawrence's strongest work in each period.) Kearney only reinforces this imbalance by devoting 32 pages of his 39-page introduction to a discussion of the evolution oiThe Prussian Officer volume, whose title and ordering of stories were made by the editor Edward Garnett against Lawrence's own wishes. Kearney has some interesting (if problematic) things to say about these matters, but they make for a curious entrée to the remainder of the volume and fail to provide the sort of overview of Lawrence's career in short fiction needed by the students who are the putative audience for such a volume. These readers will do far better to consult critics such as Janice Hubbard Harris and Weldon Thornton, whose books on Lawrence's short fiction offer a clear and informed understanding of its overall development as well as cogent, original readings of individual stories. (Thornton's study focuses on nine stories selected from the three primary phases of Lawrence's career...