The Lost Girl

Alvina Houghton is the only child of a failing draper in Woodhouse, a dull colliery town in the English Midlands, and her future looks set: respectable, narrowing, loveless spinsterhood. Restless and proud, she breaks out as far as she can — training as a maternity nurse, then coming home to play piano at her father's shabby little theatre-cinema. There she meets a troupe of touring performers, the Natcha-Kee-Tawara, and among them the swarthy, silent Italian, Ciccio: a man utterly unlike anything Woodhouse has to offer.

Against every voice of respectability, and against her own pride, Alvina gives herself to him, marries him, and follows him out of England altogether — to a remote, poor, half-primitive village in the mountains of southern Italy, cut off from everything she has known. "You're a lost girl!" the cry goes up when the truth comes out; and Alvina, to everyone's scandal, answers that she likes being lost.

First published in 1920 and awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, The Lost Girl is the most accessible of Lawrence's major novels — opening in broad, comic, sharply observed Midlands realism and darkening, as Alvina is drawn south, into the symbolic intensity that is his alone. Beneath the story of nurse-training and theatre acts and an Italian marriage lies a study of escape: a woman's risky bid for passion and a self of her own, with "lost" hanging over the final pages as both promise and threat.

This edition pairs the complete text with an editor's foreword on the novel's making and meaning, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.