検索キーワード： 著者 "A.D. Lawrence" すべてのカテゴリー

 "The Man Who Was Through With the World" picks up the same themes as in Lawrence's short story "The Man Who Loved Islands". He asks if we can ever withdraw from the world, no matter how much it disgusts us. The ironic part of this fragment is that the hermit vainly seeks to think holy thoughts while all around him is the natural world which could provide his life with meaning. The fragment is unfinished, leaving the listener to wonder if the hero would return to the world, if the world would come to him, or if nature would take its course and let him die in his hut. 

"The Blue Moccasins" has the charm of looking at some eternal human problems such as unequal marriage, the waning of sexual desire, and a woman who cannot give herself wholly to her husband in a thoroughly English and local setting: the stage of an amateur dramatic society where all the passions and delusions come to a head. 

"Mother and Daughter" can be understood as one of Lawrence's diatribes against women. Two women do their best to get along without men, but in the end, as Lawrence always proposed, a woman cannot be fulfilled without a dominant man, however unsuitable he may be.

"A Dream of Life" is unfinished, but there is enough extant to let us know where Lawrence was going in this story. He begins by looking back and bemoaning what has become of his generation, under the thumb of women and lacking the spark of his father's mining friends. Then, in a scene reminiscent of Pilgrim's Progress, he travels forward in time and sees his village in the distant future. The people are living in an idealized commune, but do they have the spark of life? 

Awarded the 1920 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, The Lost Girl is a classic tale of passion, sexual awakening, devastation, and destitution. Just as the lovely Alvina Houghton comes of age, her widowed father’s business starts to dry up. In a drastic effort to regain his fortune...

"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 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.

 "A Sick Collier". Lawrence returns in this story to the scenes of his childhood and the colliers he was brought up with. The wife in the story is probably based on his mother, although the husband is unlike the drinking, brutal father portrayed in Sons and Lovers, Lawrence's autobiographical novel. The story is a vivid portrayal of the life of a young couple when an accident strikes the husband down, but does not succeed as a short story, lacking any clear focus or message. 

"The Thorn in the Flesh" was written by D.H. Lawrence in 1914. The story can be listened to in tandem with "The Prussian Officer", which was written in the same year and has a similar setting and theme. In this story, the young soldier fights against his own shortcomings as a soldier and as a man. He flees the scene of his crime into the arms of his lover, where he finds solace and comfort, but he cannot escape the inevitable military machine that Lawrence hated.

"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.

"Odour of Chrysanthemums" was written by D H Lawrence in 1911. Lawrence is at his best in this story, taken from the scenes of his childhood and based on characters he knew intimately. He reworked the story in the play The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd, but in this short-story version, Lawrence sees the tragic episode through the eyes of the wife. The theme of a loveless marriage redeemed by death is one that Lawrence was to come back to in other stories.