David Herbert Lawrence

"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....

"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....

"The Horse Dealer's Daughter" is a story gripping in its content. It encompasses the terror of death and disgrace, which is redeemed by passion and sexuality....

"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....

"The Princess" of the story is a spoiled, sexless woman who is thrown in with a passionate man whom she takes into her bed and then rejects. This rejection leads to his ultimate death. Set against the bleak mountains of South America, it is one of Lawrence's most enduring tales....

"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....

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....

"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 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....

"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....

"The Lovely Lady" is a fine observation of a life that thrives by sucking the life out of others. The two victims escape by a somewhat melodramatic and comical means, but in the process destroy the lovely lady and form what will probably be a dull and passionless union....

"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 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....

"Mother and Daughter" can be understood as one of Lawrence's diatribes against women. Two women do their best to get along without men, but in the end, as Lawrence always proposed, a woman cannot be fulfilled without a dominant man, however unsuitable he may be....

"Rawdon's Roof" is a slight comic piece, relying for its humor on the folly of a man throwing away his chance of happiness because of an unexplained and unlikely vow....

"Things" takes a cutting look at two "idealistic" young Americans who travel around Europe in an attempt to give their spoiled lives some meaning, and in the end settle for suburban America, surrounded by their possessions, their "things"....

"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....

"Jimmy and the Desperate Woman" tells the improbable story of an intellectual editor persuading a working woman to live with him. We would say now "on the rebound" from a failed marriage, but Lawrence poses questions about what makes us attracted to other people....

"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....

"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....