Lost Girl finds herself at last
ANTAGONISING some, D.H. Lawrence certainly immortalised the people and places he knew, and in The Lost Girl - 100 this month - he really went to town!
Eastwood became Woodhouse, Langley Mill, Lumley. Elegant entrepreneurial dreamer, George Henry Cullen, of London House, 19 Nottingham Road, turns into James Houghton, dandy of Manchester House, whose enterprises also fail.
The Cullens’ devoted governess Miss Wright, who tutored young Lawrence, appears as Miss Frost. Chief assistant at the shop, Miss Pidsley, is portrayed as shrewd Miss Pinnegar. Shabby, scrounging, “dapper and yet down at heel” theatrical friend of Lawrence’s, Maurice Magnus, who once managed Isadora Duncan, is imported. He’s Houghton’s business partner Mr May - “the pushing worldly man of back alleys, oozing guile and seething with bitchiness.”
Heroine, Alvina Houghton, is unlike Flossie Cullen, though both were nurses. Alvina finds herself by risking all... through marriage to actor Ciccio and awakening in Italy. Sailing away they look back at the cliffs. England “like a long, ash-grey coffin slowly submerging.” After a tiring journey they scramble like goats, as the Lawrences did, reaching a “cold and primitive” farmstead above the village of Picinisco (renamed Pescocalascio), in the Abruzzi mountains. Farmer Orazio Cervi is Pancrazio. Life is vivid as “lilac fire”, though savagely hard.
Sales were poor - 2,000 by the end of the year - reviewers cruel. Virginia Woolf got snooty in the Times Lit Supp, seemingly giving up before the transfigurative finale. While “friend” Middleton Murry wrote in Athenaeum, “Mr Lawrence would have us back in the slime from which we rose.” Lawrence assures Secker this is “the drivel of the impotent.”
Vindication! The Lost Girl was awarded the James Tait Black
Prize for best novel of 1921 - £100, and the only official recognition Lawrence ever had.
Is Lost Girl a lost cause? Far from it. Film Director Christopher Miles, who made Virgin and the Gipsy the box office hit of 1970, is on the case. Despite Brexit and Covid, he says he’s now found “a superb location for the Italian sequences.” A vast new audience may yet find Alvina.
100 years ago, 30th Nov 1920, Lawrence’s letters discuss royalties and other Lost Girl matters with Robert Mountsier and publisher Secker.
Amy Lowell hears of “masses of rain” then “today a rainbow and tramontana wind and blue sea, and Calabria such a blue morningjewel I could weep.” Many “little white and yellow narcissus are out among the rocks, scenting the air and smelling like the world’s morning.” He’s sending The Lost Girl, “just out in London. Perhaps this will sell, and make me some money.”