David Herbert Lawrence

"Tickets Please" returns Lawrence to his native Nottingham during the First World War. The social revolution of women doing jobs previously done by men also begins to change the relationship between the sexes, and the women in the story are aggressive and wanting their rights....

"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....

"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....

"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....

"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....

"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 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....

"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"....

"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 theme of the woman for whom the man is not "good enough" is worked out fully in Lawrence's novel Sons and Lovers. The story is beautifully observed, as are the relationships in working families. The suspense of "will she, won't she is kept on the boil until the last line....

"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....

The hero of this story returns to England to undertake a "respectable" marriage, but is drawn to see the passionate love of his life once more. Their mutual passion attracts and repels the couple in equal measure, but the young man pulls away in a literal fire of passion....

"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 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....

"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....

"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....

"The Primrose Path" looks at what can be the ephemeral nature of man and woman, love, and the horror and certainty of death, which seems to hang over all the characters in this haunting short story....

"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....

"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 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....