Other editions of book The Lost Girl

Under-appreciated until now, 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.

The daughter of well-to-do trades people in the fictional mining town of Woodhouse, Alvina Houghton struggles to find excitement in her provincial surroundings and worries that she is condemned to become an old maid. After plans to elope with her lover to Australia and train as a nurse in London lead to nothing, she joins a traveling theater group and succumbs to the charms of the dark, passionate Italian Ciccio.

The Lost Girl, D. H. Lawrence’s forgotten novel, is a passionate tale of longing and sexual defiance, of devastation and destitution.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.

The Lost Girl, D. H. Lawrence’s forgotten novel, is a passionate tale of longing and sexual defiance, of devastation and destitution.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.

This edition incorporates an original introduction from Moorside Press, including a biography, a critical discussion of Lawrence's place in the history of British Literature and a short contextual discussion of the book.The plot of The Lost Girl, Lawrence’s fifth novel published in 1920, is built on irony. Alvina Houghton, heiress to a drapery in the midst of Midlands coal country, comes of age just as her father’s business is failing. Seeking to secure her future, he buys a theatre, but succeeds only in having one of the travelling performers, a suave Italian called Ciccio, capture his daughter’s heart. Together they travel to Southern Italy where Alvina finds a sense of freedom and sexual liberty. There’s a touch of Dickens about the novel, certainly in the sense of irony within the plot and the way decisions taken with the best intentions can lead to the worst outcome. For Lawrence of course, such a plot line enables him to explore outside the normal social boundaries and where the father might think his daughter was lost, Lawrence and the daughter would consider her found.

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.

‘The Lost Girl’ was published in 1920, although Lawrence had begun it as early as 1913. It was poorly received in England but did better in America and earned Lawrence some of the money he was desperately short of and which was one of the motives which drove him to finish the book.As is usual with Lawrence, he is best when writing about the small provincial societies and people he knew so well and less good when he attempts to be grand and paint on a wider canvas. So the early part of the book rings true while as soon as the story is transposed to Italy it seems contrived. Alvina, the ‘lost girl’ is an unusual character. She does not know what she wants and flits from occupation and from man to man until finally settling for her Italian lover who moves her physically but hardly intellectually. She is a proto-feminist who ironically gives it all up for a man, house and child.‘The Lost Girl’ is still worth reading for its picture of provincial life and its insights into the mind of a young woman of her time, trying to be independent and yet caught up with the conventions which support and repress her.

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" 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.

The Lost Girl is a novel by D. H. Lawrence, first published in 1920. It was awarded the 1920 James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the fiction category. Lawrence started it shortly after writing Women in Love, and worked on it only sporadically until he completed it in 1920. 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.

The Lost Girl (1920) by D. H. Lawrence, is the winner of the 1920 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. In this sophisticated psychological novel, Alvina Houghton, a young Englishwoman, undergoes a journey of self-discovery, after finding herself alone in the world. Courted by several men, she does not make a final choice to commit to anyone until she finds her true love.