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.
Editions
X-Ray
“Whatever life may be, and whatever horror men have made of it, the world is a lovely place, a magic place, something to marvel over. The world is an amazing place.””
— D. H. Lawrence
“She came upon a bankside of lavender crocuses. The sun was on them for the moment, and they were opened flat, great five-pointed, seven-pointed lilac stars, with burning centres, burning with a strange lavender flame, as she had seen some metal burn lilac-flamed in the laboratory of the hospital at Islington. All down and oak-dry bankside they burned their great exposed stars. And she felt like going down on her knees and bending her forehead to the earth in an oriental submission, they were so royal, so lovely, so supreme. She came again to them in the morning, when the sky was grey, and they were closed, sharp clubs, wonderfully fragile on their stems of sap, among leaves and old grass and wild periwinkle. They had wonderful dark stripes running up their cheeks, the crocuses, like the clear proud stripes on a badger’s face, or on some proud cat. She took a handful of the sappy, shut, striped flames. In her room they opened into a grand bowl of lilac fire.””
— D. H. Lawrence
“But to a woman, failure is another matter. For her it means failure to live, failure to establish her own life on the face of the earth. And this is humiliating, the ultimate humiliation.””
— D. H. Lawrence
“Every individual should, by nature, have his extraordinary points. But nowadays, you may look for them with a microscope, they are so worn-down by the regular machine-friction of our average and mechanical days.””
— D. H. Lawrence
“Awful things men were, savage, cruel, underneath their civilization.””
— D. H. Lawrence
“Wisdom has reference only to the past. The future remains for ever an infinite field for mistakes.””
— D. H. Lawrence
“For him, it was not yet quite natural to express himself in speech. Gesture and grimace were instantaneous, and spoke worlds of things, if you would but accept them.””
— D. H. Lawrence
“Odd, eccentric people they were, these entertainers. Most of them had a streak of imagination, and most of them drank. Most of them were middle-aged. Most of them had an abstracted manner; in ordinary life, they seemed left aside, somehow. Odd, extraneous creatures, often a little depressed, feeling life slip away from them. The cinema was killing them.””
— D. H. Lawrence
“Surely enough books have been written about heroines in similar circumstances. There is no need to go into the details of Alvina's six months in Islington.””
— D. H. Lawrence
