The Lost Girl

D.H. Lawrence The Lost Girl (1920)
The Lost Girl was written around the same time as The Rainbow, then rewritten for publication in 1920, presumably incorporating semiautobiographical details of much which had occurred within Lawrence's world since the first draft. It's difficult to gauge the extent of the revisions, but there are points at which the tone switches so dramatically as to leave the whole feeling a little like two different books, albeit both telling the same story. The first chapter, focusing upon the father of Alvina, our Lost Girl - herself loosely based on Frieda, Lawrence's wife - makes numerous references to nineteenth century novelists - George McDonald, Dickens, Wilkie Collins and others - whilst betraying an influence of the same, strongly suggesting the possibility of having survived the 1920 rewrite more or less unchanged.

By contrast, the second chapter introduces Alvina in an unusually light, jocular tone very much contradicting the received wisdom of Lawrence lacking a sense of humour, particularly once we meet the theatrical sideshow performers who catalyse the action of the novel, specifically Alvina's escape from both a stifling home environment and then England itself. The performers, clownish and exaggerated, are described with sardonic indulgence rather than sentiment or anything so dismissive as the frowning misanthropy we are supposed to expect of Lawrence. He didn't much like the vulgarity of the modern world, but clearly shared the working class love of spectacle and garish folk tradition. The flamboyant Natcha-Kee-Tawara theatre troupe, for example, perform dubious Red Indian scenes at the newly opened cinema - James Houghton's latest doomed venture; and if Lawrence regards them as brash, describing their performance in anthropological terms as he would later describe actual Taos Indian rituals, he is sympathetic, seemingly regarding the noise as more honest than the moving pictures of Houghton's cinema and so more in tune with his class.

The introduction of the Natcha-Kee-Tawara additionally seems to suspend reality in some vaguely Shakespearean sense, allowing for the derailment of narrative conventions and for occurrences of the chance and unexpected, notably Alvina encountering Cicio with whom she eventually flees to Italy, as did Lawrence and Frieda.

Unfortunately, the general tone changes once again from this point on, reverting to Lawrence's more familiar landscape of emotional tumult and psychological undercurrents which, given the contrast with the first half, suggests either indecision, a lack of direction, or simply that The Lost Girl needed a little more work prior to publication. As it stands, the transition from relative whimsy to the cloying Dickensian sentiment describing the death of James Houghton and the subsequent fate of his daughter is jarring, giving an impression of certain passages having been subject to much greater revision than others. We almost have two books here, at least in terms of tone, and while one is certainly respectable and consistent with the author's reputation, the other one could have been great.