THE WIDOWING OF
MRS. HOLROYD
A DRAMA IN THREE ACTS
BY
D. H. LAWRENCE
LONDON
DUCKWORTH & CO.
3, Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, W. C.
1914
COPYRIGHT 1914 BY
MITCHELL KENNERLEY
THE·PLIMPTON·PRESS
NORWOOD·MASS·U·S·A
CONTENTS
| PAGE | |
|---|---|
| Introduction | vii |
| The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd | 1 |
INTRODUCTION
D H. Lawrence is one of the most significant of the new generationof writers just beginning to appear in England. One of their chiefmarks is that they seem to step forward full-grown, without a historyto account for their maturity. Another characteristic is that theyfrequently spring from social layers which in the past had to remainlargely voiceless. And finally, they have all in their blood whattheir elders had to acquire painfully: that is, an evolutionaryconception of life.
Three years ago the author of "The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd" waswholly unknown, having not yet published a single work. To-day he hasto his credit three novels—"The White Peacock," "The Trespasser"and "Sons and Lovers"—a collection of verse entitled "Love Poems,"and the play contained in this volume. All of these works, but inparticular the play and the latest novel, prove their author a mangifted with a strikingly original vision, a keen sense of beauty, anequally keen sense of verbal values, and a sincerity, which makes himsee and tell the truth where even the most audacious used to falter inthe past. Flaubert himself was hardly less free from the old curse ofsentimentalizing compromise—and yet this young writer knows how totell the utmost truth with a daintiness that puts offence out of thequestion.
He was born twenty-seven years ago in a coal-miner's cottage atthe little colliery town of Eastwood, on the border line betweenNottingham and Derbyshire. The home was poor, yet not without certainaspirations and refinements. It was the mother who held it together,who saved it from a still more abject poverty, and who filled it witha spirit that made it possible for the boy—her youngest son—to keepalive the gifts still slumbering undiscovered within him. In "Sons andLovers" we get the picture of just such a home and such a mother, andit seems safe to conclude that the novel in question is in many waysautobiographical.
At the age of twelve the boy won a County Council Scholarship—andcame near having to give it up because he found that the fifteenpounds a year conferred by it would barely pay the fees at theNottingham High School and the railway fares to that city. But hismother's determination and self-sacrifice carried him safely past theseemingly impossible. At sixteen he left school to earn his livingas a clerk. Illness saved him from that uncongenial fate. Instead hebecame a teacher, having charge of a class of colliers' boys in one ofthose rough, old-fashioned British sc