David Herbert Lawrence

"Wintry Peacock" is, on the surface, a tale of misdirected love or even irresponsible love, the relationship between the wife and the peacock being the most strange, but it is the conspiracy to prevent the truth coming out about the husband's love child that is most disturbing....

"The Blind Man" is a delicate study of a loving relationship blighted by the man's blindness and disfigurement in the First World War. The arrival of an old friend of the woman brings into the open feelings and fears previously suppressed....

"Rex" is a riotous story of the turmoil caused in a household by the arrival of a puppy. The setting is similar to the one found in Sons and Lovers, but Lawrence thought this scene deserved the fuller treatment of a short story....

"Samson and Delilah" is set against a Cornish backdrop. Lawrence and his wife tried to settle in Cornwall during the First World War, but were hounded by the authorities and forced to leave. It is almost a Homeric story of a husband returning home after a long absence....

"The Overtone" looks at a sterile marriage with no children and no spontaneous sexual feeling between the couple. Lawrence seems to lose interest in the story, although he introduces a younger woman who walks away baffled at the end....

"The Blue Moccasins" has the charm of looking at some eternal human problems such as unequal marriage, the waning of sexual desire, and a woman who cannot give herself wholly to her husband in a thoroughly English and local setting: the stage of an amateur dramatic society....

"The Wilful Woman" was written by D.H. Lawrence in 1922. "The Wilful Woman" remained unfinished, and so the tough, spoiled, rich American woman, used to having her own way, does not get the nemesis Lawrence may have had in mind for her....

"Smile" is one of Lawrence's shorter pieces, a thumbnail sketch of an idea. A man is relieved that his wife is dead and struggles to hide his relief when confronted with his wife's body. The relief breaks out into a smile, which he struggles to excuse....

"The Last Laugh" is another of Lawrence's supernatural stories, set in a dreamlike snowy London. The question left open is who the three people in the story saw on the snowy evening. Perhaps Pan, returned to destroy the Christian God, as the church is destroyed in the story....

"Sun" is a sensual story of a woman rediscovering her sexuality through the power of the sun. But for the unexpected arrival of her businessman husband, she was ready to give herself to a local peasant, but is finally pulled back to respectability by her husband....

David Herbert Lawrence was born on the 11th September 1885 in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, a coal mining town where the reality of a harsh life was only useful as experiences for future literary works....

"In Love" handles a serious subject in a light, almost comic way. A couple are engaged but have no sexual feelings for each other. The tensions, as they try to do what is expected of them, explode until a compromise is reached. But will the marriage last? Find out....

"A Dream of Life" is unfinished, but there is enough extant to let us know where Lawrence was going in this story. He begins by looking back and bemoaning what has become of his generation, under the thumb of women and lacking the spark of his father's mining friends....

"The Flying Fish" is unfinished, but tells the story of an Englishman, Gethin Day, returning home after years in South America. There is a hint of the homesickness Lawrence may have felt during his long exile. The bulk of the story is the time spent on the ship taking Day back to England....

"Adolf" is a charming story of a wild rabbit introduced by the father into a miner's home, to the delight of the children and the despair of the mother. Larger questions of life and death and nature and civilization are touched on with a light hand....

"Glad Ghosts" is another of Lawrence's supernatural stories, set in the archetypical country house. He doesn't attempt to explain the supernatural happenings which occur, but uses them to extol his own ideas of the power of the sex drive and the triumph of life over death....

"The Border Line" is unusual in that Lawrence dabbles in the supernatural (as he was to do again in "The Rocking-Horse Winner" two years later) and that this is less a story in the traditional sense and more an exploration of the mind of a particular woman, based on his own wife, Frieda....

"Monkey Nuts" turns the traditional love story on its head. It is the woman (the new liberated woman Lawrence had little time for) who does the chasing and the boy who is reluctant....

"The Undying Man" is a slightly unfinished piece, drawing its inspiration from Shelley's Frankenstein about the creation of life and the fear of death. It is interesting to speculate where Lawrence would have gone with the story....

"The Mortal Coil" is one of Lawrence's darker stories. From adversity the lovers find a kind of happiness in each other, only for death to snatch it away....