The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd: A Drama in Three Acts

by D.H. Lawrence, John Worthen (Foreword by)

The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd , written immediately after Sons and Lovers, is one of D. H. Lawrence's most significant early works. The play, Lawrence's first, is the alter ego of the story "Odour of Chrysanthemums" and, like the short story, deals with a catastrophe in the lives of a coal mining family. Drawing upon the intensity of events that unfold in the miner's kitchen, the play explores a marriage bowed under the weight of a husband's drinking and infidelity and peers into the strange, burgeoning relationship between the neglected wife, Mrs. Holroyd, and the young electrician in whom she seeks emotional refuge. First published in 1914, The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd is a bare tracing of the ways in which a marriage has gone wrong.

Genres: Plays, Fiction

112 pages, Paperback

First published July 7, 1914

About the author

David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English writer of the 20th century, whose prolific and diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism, and personal letters. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, human sexuality and instinct.

Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage." At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel. He is now generally valued as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.H._Law...

Reviews

[Petra X · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dank, dark, Northern angst set among miners. Lawrence's speciality. Mrs. Holroyd didn't marry for love and didn't find it in her marriage with the husband who humiliated her for his own amusement and beat her because she was his slave. But dawning happiness with another and the sudden fulfilment of wishing her brutish, brutal husband dead brought out the guilt in her. Years of ill-treatment fell away as she washed his corpse and all she could do was sob out her regrets and eulogise the dead.

Silly cow.

[°•.Melina°•. · Rating 4 out of 5]

خوشحالم که سال رو با لارنس شروع کردم.
میدونم که 2026 لابد ۸۰٪ کتابهاشو خواهم خوند،
چون رسما جزو ۵ تا نویسنده‌ی محبوبم شده.
این کتاب هم شباهت‌های جالبی به نمایشنامه‌ی 'عروس'ش داشت، گیرا تلخ و پر از مفهوم‌های روانشناسیِ خانوادگی/زناشویی.

[Illiterate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Powerful, naturalistic, working-class, domestic tragedy of marriage, disappointment, guilt.

[Debi Cates · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bittersweet, more bitter than sweet. The bonds between a married couple, however unhappy and brutal, are worthy of mourning at its final, unredeemable end.

[Mohsen · Rating 3 out of 5]

کشمکش های یک قلب مضطرب

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

Passionate D.H. Lawrence story of adulterous love.