D.H. Lawrence's The Lost Girl

D.H. Lawrence

Description

"How Lawrence Found His Lost Girl in Cornwall", is the title of the Introduction to this edition of Lawrence's sixth major novel. In it Sandra Jobson shows how Lawrence based part of his character Alvina Houghton on Katherine Mansfield, the New Zealand short-story writer.

'The Lost Girl' was in fact Lawrence's third novel, but was not published until 1920. It is his only novel to have won a literary prize. Originally called 'The Insurrection of Miss Houghton', it tells the story of Alvina Houghton, who fights for independence as a woman, but ends up falling in love with an Italian peasant form a mountain village. Will she fight again for independence?

Sandra Jobson (Darroch) is the secretary of the DH Lawrence Society of Australia, and is the author of six books, including the first biography of Lady Ottoline Morrell, 'Ottoline: The Life of Lady Ottoline Morrell' (Chatto Windus 1975).

An updated version of 'Ottoline', with a new Introduction by the author, will be published by The Svengali Press in 2017.

Sujets

• Classics
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: The Svengali Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781925416480
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE LOST GIRL

by

D.H. LAWRENCE

With an Introduction

“How Lawrence found his Lost Girl in Cornwall”

By

SANDRA JOBSON



&

ETT Imprint
Sydney 2016
This edition first published by Svengali Press & ETT Imprint, 2016

This book is copyright.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission.

Inquiries should be addressed to the publishers.



PO Box 1852
Strawberry Hills NSW 2012 AUSTRALIA
http://www.svengalipress.com

&


ETT Imprint
PO Box R1906
Royal Exchange
NSW 1225 AUSTRALIA

The Lost Girl first published 1920
Introduction copyright © Sandra Jobson, 2016

Copyright in this edition © Svengali Press & ETT Imprint, 2016, based on USA (Seltzer) edition 1921

Cover portraits:
D.H. Lawrence by Paul Delprat
Katherine Mansfield by Anne Estelle Rice

ISBN: 978-1-925416-47-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-925416-48-0 (ebk)

Digital distribution by Ebook Alchemy
CUE-TITLES (see full bibliography at end of the Introduction)

D.H. LAWRENCE:
The Letters of D.H. Lawrence. (Cambridge University Press) 1979-2000 ( Volumes I, II and III) CUE-TITLE: “Lawrence Letters ”
The Lost Girl, ( Cambridge University Press [CUP]) 1987 , edited by John Worthen. CUE-TITLE: “ Lost Girl: CUP”
The Lost Girl, (Svengali Press. Sydney) 2016. CUE-TITLE: “ Lost Girl: Sven”

KATHERINE MANSFIELD :
Journal (New York: Knopf) 1946 CUE-TITLE: “Mansfield Journal”
The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield (Oxford: Clarendon Press) 1984. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, eds. CUE-TITLE: Mansfield Letters

Biographies of Katherine Mansfield

ANTONY ALPERS. The Life of Katherine Mansfield . (Jonathan Cape: London) 1980. CUE-TITLE: “Alpers”

CLAIRE TOMALIN Katherine Mansfield a Secret Life. ( Penguin Books) 1988. CUE-TITLE: “Tomalin”

JEFFREY MYERS Katheine Mansfield A Biography . (Hamish Hamilton, London)1978. CUE-TITLE: “Myer s ”
INTRODUCTION
“How Lawrence found his Lost Girl in Cornwall”
SCHOLARS and critics have long believed that Lawrence based the title character Alvina Houghton in his 1920 novel The Lost Girl on Florence Cullen, a young woman he had known in the Midlands mining town where he grew up. But they are only half-right, for it is my conviction that a substantial part of the Alvina character in the novel is based on someone else, someone Lawrence knew very well – the New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield.
My Introduction to this re-formatted version of the U.S. (Seltzer) edition of The Lost Girl will provide a new interpretation of Lawrence’s first post-war novel. I will show how he also used significant aspects and characteristics of Katherine Mansfield throughout the text. (I will also explain how my antipodean eye – and ear – guided me to this fresh interpretation.)
First we need to review the novel’s long gestation. When, in December 1912, Lawrence started to write his third – but what became his sixth – major novel, he declared: “I shall do a novel about Love Triumphant one day…I shall do my work for women, better than the suffrage.” 1 He called his first draft ‘Elsa Culverwell’, and only 20 pages of it have survived 2 . This is the only vestige we have of his various work-in-progress texts, before the final manuscript, and published version, of The Lost Girl, which Lawrence was to complete in Sicily eight years later.
This first version ‘Elsa Culverwell’ describes Elsa and her family, living in gloomy premises above the family shop, and establishes the central characters and some elements of the plot of the eventual The Lost Girl story: the heroine, then named Elsa; her pathetically optimistic father, whose business ventures were always doomed; her ailing mother; the reliable governess; and the store manager. However, these 20 pages end before Elsa leaves home (as later versions go on to chronicle).
Around January 20, 1913, Lawrence scrapped his 20-page text of ‘Elsa Culverwell’ and started work on the novel again, inserting a new beginning and calling the new work ‘The Insurrection of Miss Houghton ’. He also re-named his heroine: first “Anna Houghton”, and then “Alvina Houghton” (pronounced “Huff-ton”). According to his letters, by March 5 he had written “Rather more than half…” 3 . However, he was starting to have misgivings about the new work, feeling it wasn't the right time to publish it (he was already having concerns over “sexual” references in his yet-to-be published Sons and Lovers ). So around mid-March he abandoned the second text and instead turned his attention to ‘The Sisters’ – the precursor of The Rainbow and Women in Love. Just before the Great War broke out, he took the ‘Insurrection’ manuscript with him to Germany, leaving it with Frieda’s family in Bavaria. In 1916 he made efforts to retrieve the manuscript from Germany, but war prevented this, and it was not until December 1919, when he was living on Capri, that he finally managed to take delivery of the 1913 manuscript, now forwarded to him from Bavaria.
No part of this second text has survived, nor are there any surviving pages of any further texts, up until the published version. John Worthen, the editor of the Cambridge University Press (CUP) edition of The Lost Girl , believes 4 that very little of the 1913 text came to be incorporated into the ultimate text of what Lawrence called the "new novel”, and which he started writing after he left Capri and settled in Taormina in Sicily in early 1920. Without that 1913 manuscript it is difficult to disentangle what ingredients and influences went into the text – that he had provisionally re-named ‘Mixed Marriage’ – which Lawrence put together in Taormina in 1920. Certainly, later elements of the life of Florence Cullen (not mentioned in the initial 20 pages) are included in the final text, such as after Florence left home to become a nurse (recorded in chapter III) and when she played the piano in her father’s cinema (chapter IV).
But midway into the new text the actual life of Florence Cullen and the fictional life of Alvina Houghton start to diverge. In chapter X Alvina runs off to the North of England with the member of a musical troupe, with whom she had fallen in love. Florence Cullen did not do this. In fact, she married in Eastwood and settled down to have a family. It is here that Katherine Mansfield enters the scene, for in 1908 she had run off to the North of England with a musical performer she had fallen in love with. From now on the text has two Alvinas, one based on Lawrence’s memory of Eastwood and Florence Cullen, the other on what he had learned from Katherine Mansfield about her life-story and character. (As Lawrence’s childhood friend George Neville and others have pointed out 5 , he seldom wrote other than about real-life people and events.)
Lawrence had first met Katherine in 1913, and for the following eight years their lives were at least partly entwined. It was a crucial time in both their lives, personally and in their development as writers. By 1920, when Lawrence finally sat down to rewrite what became The Lost Girl , much had happened to him… his elopement and later marriage to Frieda (Weekley, nee von Richthofen); the banning of his novel The Rainbow ; his traumatic experiences in wartime Cornwall; his escape from England in 1919; and his and Frieda’s subsequent peregrinations around Europe.
Although he was still very much the struggling writer, he was (with the 1920 publication of Women in Love in America) on the verge of literary success and eventual financial security. Katherine was also a struggling writer (of shorter fiction). Her personal life was messy, and she was in an on-off, off-on relationship with the writer and literary critic John Middleton Murry, whom she was eventually to marry. She was also in the early stages of “consumption”, the disease that was to kill her in 1923.
She and Lawrence formed a friendship after they first met in 1913, when Lawrence returned from Italy after the completion of perhaps his most popular novel, Sons and Lovers . He knew of her repeated attempts to become an independent woman - like, in many ways, his heroine Alvina had. By the time he wrote The Lost Girl he had already partly portrayed her as Gudrun in Women in Love. Just before he began The Lost Girl in Taormina he had also written a play, Touch and Go , in which he portrayed both Katherine and her partner Murry as Anabel and Gerald . There is also a touch of Katherine in his later short stories, ‘Smile’ and ‘The Fox’. To help track Katherine’s influence in The Lost Girl, a brief glance at her life is useful. Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp 6 was born in 1888 into a comfortable, well-off New Zealand “establishment” family. Her father was later to become chairman of the Bank of New Zealand. Katherine was expected to grow up to become a young, upper-middle-class “lady”. It turned out, however, that she was rebellious, very intelligent, highly strung, and showing early signs as a talented writer. While at school she started a Lesbian relationship with a fellow student, a half-caste Maori princess, which continued later when they met again in London. As a young girl, Katherine was the ugly duckling of her family, fat and unattractive, but later she lost weight and emerged as a young woman with delicate, bewitching features. During her short life she had sexual relationships with both men and women, who were attrac