The Lost Girl
1920
D.H. Lawrence's The Lost Girl is a provocative examination of one woman's rebellion against the suffocating conventions of early 20th-century England. Alvina Houghton, the daughter of a failing merchant in the industrial town of Woodhouse, finds herself trapped between her father's financial ruin and society's expectation that she will become another unmarried woman, a fate she dreads more than poverty. Lawrence, never one to shy from the raw currents beneath English propriety, traces Alvina's awakening as she rejects the respectable path laid before her and instead joins a traveling theater troupe, seeking danger, passion, and selfhood in the margins of respectable society. Her encounter with the dark, passionate Italian Ciccio becomes both a sensual reckoning and a question about what it means to truly belong to oneself. Winner of the 1920 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, The Lost Girl remains for readers who cherish unapologetically female narratives of desire and self-determination.
