The Lost Girl

Product Description<br/><br/><br/>Alvina Houghton, the daughter of a widowed Midlands draper, comes of age just as her father’s business is failing. In a desperate attempt to regain his fortune and secure his daughter’s proper upbringing, James Houghton buys a theater. Among the traveling performers he employs is Ciccio, a sensual Italian who immediately captures Alvina’s attention. Fleeing with him to Naples, she leaves her safe world behind and enters one of sexual awakening, desire, and fleeting freedom.<br/><br/><br/>Review<br/><br/><br/>"[Lawrence was] a writer with an extraordinary sense of the physical world, of the colour and texture and shape of things, for whom the body was alive and the problems of the body insistent and important." --Virginia Woolf<br/><br/><br/>About the Author<br/><br/><br/>An English novelist, poet, playwright, literary critic, and painter, D. H. Lawrence is best known for his novels Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley s Lover. Writing in the period leading up to and following the First World War, Lawrence s work explores the nature of personal and sexual relationships in light of industrialization and the new culture of modernity. Persecuted for his strong opinions, Lawrence spent the second part of his career in an exile he referred to as his savage pilgrimage, while his work continued to be censored and misrepresented, resulting in the sensational obscenity trial of Lady Chatterley s Lover. Lawrence died in 1930 and is considered to be a visionary thinker and significant representative of modernism in English literature.<br/><br/><br/>From the Back Cover<br/><br/><br/>“[Lawrence was] a writer with an extraordinary sense of the physical world, of the colour and texture and shape of things, for whom the body was alive and the problems of the body insistent and important.” —Virginia Woolf<br/><br/><br/>From the Publisher<br/><br/><br/>Under-appreciated until now,<br/>The Lost Girl is perhaps D.H. Lawrence's most beautiful, thoroughly contemporary, love story. This captivating novel charts the journey of a woman caught between two worlds and two lives-one mired in dreary, industrial England and a life of convention, the other set in the vibrant Italian landscape holding the promise of sensual liberation. Alvina Houghton is fading into spinsterhood when she meets Naples-born Cicio, a vaudeville dancer who draws her into a dance of seduction, reawakening her desire as she defies her stifling upper-class life.<br/><br/><br/>From the Inside Flap<br/><br/><br/>"The Lost Girl, D. H. Lawrence's forgotten novel, is a passionate tale of longing and sexual defiance, of devastation and destitution.<br/>Alvina Houghton, the daughter of a widowed Midlands draper, comes of age just as her father's business is failing. In a desperate attempt to regain his fortune and secure his daughter's proper upbringing, James Houghton buys a theater. Among the traveling performers he employs is Ciccio, a sensual Italian who immediately captures Alvina's attention. Fleeing with him to Naples, she leaves her safe world behind and enters one of sexual awakening, desire, and fleeting freedom.<br/><br/><br/>Book Description<br/><br/><br/>Worthen provides a substantial introduction to Lawrence's The Lost Girl, tracing the novel's development from rough drafts through publication and censorship. Included in this edition is a hitherto unpublished version of the opening chapter.<br/><br/><br/>Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.<br/><br/><br/>CHAPTER IThe Decline of Manchester House<br/><br/>Take a mining townlet like Woodhouse, with a population of ten thousand people, and three generations behind it. This space of three generations argues a certain well-established society. The old “County”1 has fled from the sight of so much disembowelled coal, to flourish on mineral rights in regions still idyllic. Remains one great and inaccessible magnate, the local coal owner: three generations old, and clambering on the bottom step of the “County,” kicking off the mass below. Rule him out.<br/><br/>A well established society in Woodhouse, full of fine shades, ranging from the dark of coal-dust