検索キーワード： 著者 "DH Lawrence" すべてのカテゴリー

"Jimmy and the Desperate Woman" tells the improbable story of an intellectual editor persuading a working woman to live with him. We would say now "on the rebound" from a failed marriage, but Lawrence crosses the class divide and poses questions about what makes us attracted to other people. The intellectual twists and turns of the magazine editor contrast nicely with the stark honesty of the spurned miner husband.

"Smile" is one of Lawrence's shorter pieces, a thumbnail sketch of an idea. A man is relieved that his wife is dead and struggles to hide his relief when confronted with his wife's body. The relief breaks out into a smile, which he struggles to excuse. How much better it would have been, Lawrence seems to be saying, if he had just laughed out loud!

"The Border Line" is unusual in that Lawrence dabbles in the supernatural (as he was to do again in "The Rocking-Horse Winner" two years later) and that this is less a story in the traditional sense and more an exploration of the mind of a particular woman, based on his own wife, Frieda. Katherine, in the story, realizes that her real love was her first husband, whom she should, according to Lawrence, have submitted to to gain real happiness. As Lawrence says in the story, thinking of his German wife, perhaps, "Beyond all race is the problem of man and woman."

"Sun" is a sensual story of a woman rediscovering her sexuality through the power of the sun. But for the unexpected arrival of her businessman husband, she was ready to give herself to a local peasant, but is finally pulled back to respectability by her husband. But she is free to remain apart from him in the sun.

"The Flying Fish" is unfinished, but tells the story of an Englishman, Gethin Day, returning home after years in South America. There is a hint of the homesickness Lawrence may have felt during his long exile. The bulk of the story is the time spent on the ship which is taking Day back to England. It is a ship of fools, a "plague ship", and the only positive note is the joy Day sees in the play of the flying fish and porpoises around the ship. It is tantalizing to speculate how Day would have adapted to English life again, confined to an old house in an old country.

This piece of writing falls between the short story and travel writing, but is presented here as a short story largely because it depicts the warm love between Lawrence and his wife Frieda (Anita in the story) as they begin their life of travel together.

"The Shades of Spring". In this story, the hero has moved on in the world and is married, yet cannot forget his old love. He retraces the steps to her farm, hoping for - what? He finds his old love attached to a physical young man who can give the girl what he could not - pure, physical love - and this she prefers to his more intellectual love.

"Once" was written by D.H. Lawrence in 1912. The story is largely autobiographical, written when Lawrence and Frieda (Anita in the story) had fled England together to live in Austria and Italy. Frieda had had an affair while they were in Austria and she told Lawrence about it. "Once" explores Lawrence's reactions to being betrayed while still being in love and desiring the betrayer.

"Delilah and Mr Bircumshaw" was written by D.H. Lawrence in 1912. Lawrence is beginning to move away from his working-class roots in this story and exploring the relationship of a middle-class couple who have a slight argument, egged on by the wife's friend. Bircumshaw loses his dignity and self-respect for the comforts of married life. For all his insights into women, the misogynist in Lawrence can be detected.

"Her Turn" was written by D.H. Lawrence in 1912. Lawrence is at his best in this story, taken from the scenes of his childhood and based on characters he knew intimately. The scene can hardly be called a story in the traditional sense, being the altercation between a miner and his wife over the sharing of strike pay. Lawrence keeps the story lighthearted, almost comical, but the tensions of married life in hard times are just below the surface.

In "Strike Pay", Lawrence returns to the scenes of his boyhood in Eastwood in Nottinghamshire. A group of miners, liberated from work by a strike, enjoy a day out, but the hard realities of home life and mothers-in-law await their return. Tinged with good humor and the sense of comradeship among the miners and finally between the miner and his wife, this story epitomizes working life before the Great War.

"Christs in the Tirol" is more of an essay on this peculiar art form than a short story. It is included in this series as forming part of Lawrence's record of his wanderings in Europe, and partly as a record of Lawrence's attitude to religion and death and foreshadowing his own eventual suffering and death.

"The Miner at Home" was written by D.H. Lawrence in 1912. Lawrence is at his best in this story, taken from the scenes of his childhood and based on characters he knew intimately. The scene can hardly be called a story in the traditional sense, being the altercation between a miner and his wife over an impending strike, but as a picture of a working miner’s family, rich in detail and the Nottinghamshire dialect, it has a fascination and vividness.

"Second Best" was written by D.H. Lawrence in 1912. In this delicate story of boy-girl love, Lawrence is at his best, intertwining the feelings of the two lovers with the natural world around them, the countryside, flowers, and fields, and the moles who are sacrificed to bring the lovers together. The young girl may consider her lover "second best", but his passion and honesty ring true.

"New Eve and Old Adam" was written by D.H. Lawrence in 1912. The story is largely autobiographical, telling the simple tale of an argument between a husband and wife, reflecting the difficult time Lawrence and his new wife Frieda were having. What was the place of a woman to be in a modern marriage? Lawrence argued that it was the woman's place to submit or unhappiness would ensue, at it did in this story. The wife is unable to submit to her husband and the marriage disintegrates.

In this story, Lawrence returns to the scenes of his young manhood with farming scenes and the life he experienced when courting Jessie Chambers at Haggs Farm in Nottinghamshire. Two brothers find love in two different women, both out of the ordinary for farm lads - one a German nanny, the other the wife of a tramp who begs food from the farmers. Both men are redeemed from their rivalry for each other and their suppressed sexuality by the first experiences of love on the same night.

A Lesson on a Tortoise is set at a local school and shows how Lawrence was ground down by the tiresomeness of teaching and longed to be free. 

The Old Adam is a story set in lodgings in Croydon, and the incident may again be autobiographical, but the story examines for the first time in Lawrence’s writing the different and conflicting loves between men and women. 

The Man Who Loved Islands is a haunting story of a man who tries to control his life by making his world ever smaller by moving to increasingly smaller islands. Each one proves to be beyond his ability to control either other people or his sexual desire, and finally the last island conquers him. The story can even be seen as a metaphor of man's inexorable march to death, when we are all finally alone. 

A Fly in the Ointment was written by D.H. Lawrence in 1908. It was the fourth of his 67 short stories, all of which will be published individually in audiobook format by the Blackthorn Press. The story is set in lodgings in Croydon. The incident may be autobiographical, but the story is full of yearning for the life and loves he left behind in Nottinghamshire.