Introduction

D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930)

David Herbert Lawrence was born in the Nottinghamshire coal-mining town of Eastwood, the son of a miner and a former schoolteacher. After working as a clerk and a teaching assistant, he trained and qualified as a teacher himself, gaining the education his father lacked but his mother had enjoyed. His real passion, however, was writing, first poems and short stories, and then novels. Having achieved some literary fame in 1910 with his first novel,The White Peacock, he went on to develop a successful writing career, producing a string of popular works includingSons and Lovers (1913),The Rainbow (1915) andWomen in Love (1920), novels that were eventually to be recognised as landmarks in twentieth-century English literature.

Lawrence’s relationship with authority was always fraught. Travelling in Germany in 1912, prior to World War I, he was briefly detained on suspicion of being a British spy. Having returned to England in the company of his German partner, Frieda von Richthofen, he was then accused of being a German spy, suspected of signalling to U-boats off the coast of Cornwall where the couple lived. Perhaps it was this experience that prompted him and Frieda to begin what he called their ‘savage pilgrimage’, leaving Britain and travelling the world to such exotic places as Mexico, Sri Lanka, Australia and Italy, and finally settling in the USA. As he travelled, he wrote, producing acclaimed novels such asKangaroo (1923) andThe Plumed Serpent (1926), and becoming one of the most widely read serious writers in Britain at the time. If Lawrence is best known as a novelist, however, his output was very varied: it included travel writing, literary criticism and, of course, plays. Although he wrote eight plays in all, only two,The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd (written in 1910 and published in 1914) andDavid (1926), were performed in his lifetime, and it was left to posterity to stage the rest of his dramatic work.

Lawrence’s career was overshadowed by controversy. Owing to the supposedly sexually charged nature of some of his writing, notablyThe Rainbow, he gained a reputation as a pornographer, although this probably says more about early twentieth-century British society than it does about his work. The situation reached a head with the publication of his novelLady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), which was banned in Britain until, in a famous trial in 1960, the ban was successfully challenged. But Lawrence did not live to see his work vindicated. Always suffering from poor health, he was frequently laid low by diseases of the chest like pneumonia, influenza, and finally tuberculosis. Lawrence died in France in 1930 at the age of forty-five.

The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd: What Happens in the Play

Elizabeth Holroyd is unhappy, and with reason. An educated woman with refined sensibilities, she struggles to make a good home for her two children in the grime and poverty of a Nottinghamshire mining town. Poverty is not the only problem she faces, for her husband, a miner, is a brutish man, prone to fighting, drinking and spending his evenings in the pub. Mrs Holroyd’s qualities do not go entirely unacknowledged, however: Blackmore, a mine electrician, and a gentle and sensitive man, recognises her as a kindred sp