The Lost Girl: Re-appraising the Post-War Lawrence on Women’s Will and Ways of Knowing

Abstract

The assumption has often been that the ‘turn’ in Lawrence toward the so-called leadership novels — Aaron’s Rod, Kangaroo, The Plumed Serpent — resulted in his devaluing women’s activity in the world in his later work, railing against female will, and calling for the submission of women to male power. The Lost Girl, of course, certainly has been read and can still be read that way. It stands at a pivotal moment in Lawrence’s life when he finally managed to leave England after the war and was working toward leaving Europe entirely. But its publication in November 1920 is a bit misleading, since the idea for the novel and two starts at it (one of them, The Insurrection of Miss Houghton, 200 pages long) were written before the war — just after Sons and Lovers was finished and before The Rainbow and Women in Love were begun (in April 1913 as The Sisters). As John Worthen has suggested, the earliest form we have of The Lost Girl — the twenty-page manuscript of Elsa Culverwell, written in December 1912 and now published as an appendix to the Cambridge University Press Lost Girl — seems to have been written as an earnest of his promise in a letter to Sallie Hopkin dated 23 December 1912:

I shall do a novel about Love Triumphant one day. I shall do my work for women, better than the suffrage. (Letters, i. 490)