David Herbert 'D. H.' Lawrence

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 which Lawrence was to come back to in other stories....

Lawrence uses the story of a storm and the deaths it causes to revive the feelings for (if not an actual belief in) the old gods, in this case Mercury whose shrine is ignored by the tourists but who takes his revenge.

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.

In 'The Thimble', Lawrence moves to the world of the affluent middle classes, a world to which he perhaps aspired. The story is a touching one of a disfigured husband returning home from the war to a beautiful new wife. The thimble of the story can be seen to represent purposeless, surface beauty, which has no function. The husband casts the thimble away, but can this marriage survive the surface damage and find a deeper meaning?

Two short novellas brimming with Lawrence's famous power and passion. In the first, an injured German prisoner-of-war awakens a grieving woman's passion; in the second, Maurice and Geoffrey are brothers, farmers and virgins until a rainy night when Paula and Lydia chance along.