The Lost Girl

The second winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize needs no introduction but the novel with which he won it may. In 1920, the same year in which Women in Love was published, D H Lawrence was awarded the fiction prize for the novel which came after his more famous work, The Lost Girl. In The Burning Man, Frances Wilson describes the novel as “Lawrence’s least angry and most amused novel,” and Lawrence himself wrote to his publisher that it was “quite unlike my usual style” and “quite unexceptional as far as the censor is concerned.”

The novel, which was originally titled The Insurrection of Miss Houghton, is about a young woman, Alvina Houghton, born into a respectable household towards the end of the nineteenth century in the fictional town of Woodhouse. Her father is a businessman, but one more adept at losing rather than making money. His exotic taste in fabrics proves unsuitable for the mining town and leads to numerous sales:

“These sales contributed a good deal to Mrs Houghton’s nervous heart disease. They brought the first signs of wear into the face of James Houghton.”

While Alvina’s mother lives increasingly as an invalid, her father continues to hatch moneymaking schemes, which continue to fail. As she enters her twenties, Alvina begins to consider marriage, but without much enthusiasm. Her first close encounter is with an Australian, Alexander Graham, but we soon see the difficulties she faces as she cannot separate the search for a suitable husband from her emotional response, which in itself she does not always fully comprehend:

“She found him fascinating but a trifle repulsive. And she was not sure whether she hated the repulsive element, or whether she rather gloried in it.”

Her next suitor, Albert, has even less luck, determinedly pursuing her even as she often seeks to avoid him. Yet, as the family finances worsen, Miss Pinnegar (who lives with the Houghtons) is surprised when Alvina decides against him:

“I can see nothing wrong with him.”

In her view, Alvina should try to like a suitable husband rather than base her decision on instinct. Alvina’s approach to life may be regarded as more modern but she lives in an era of limited possibilities for women. She attempts a form of independence by training as a midwife, but that does not allow her to support herself. During her training she wonders:

“Was Alvina her own real self all this time? The mighty question arises upon us, what is one’s own real self?”

This is the central question for Alvina but not one she can ever answer despite straining against the limits of her position. Approaching thirty she finds herself increasingly alone. Her mother has died and her father, in a last desperate attempt to revive his fortunes, has decided to invest in a cinema. The budget is so limited that his daughter is required to provide the musical accompaniment, but it is in doing so that she meets, and becomes fascinated with, the live acts that perform before the film. In particular she is drawn to a group who perform as American Indians, led by ‘Madame’, whom she grows close to when she nurses her through an illness. But it is the Italian, Ciccio, who most attracts her attention:

“It was like meeting a lion. His long, fine nose, his rather long, rounded chin and curling lips seemed refined through ages of forgotten culture. He was waiting: silent there with something muscular and remote about his very droop, he was waiting.”

When Alvina’s father dies, she decides to join the performers, and from there a relationship with Ciccio follows in the only section of the novel to feature anything of the passion Lawrence is known for. Of course, Alvina soon finds she does not belong with the performers any more than she felt she belonged in Woodhouse, and she has one more chance to choose between a respectable middle-class life and one of reckless love – the latter, as Lawrence demonstrates, is not necessarily the better.

Though its focus is the difficulties Alvina faces attempting, and ultimately failing, to create an identity for herself as a woman that does not rely on a man – a very modern concern – it is also evident why The Lost Girl remains something of a lost novel. While some elements of Lawrence’s research, like the early cinema, remain fascinating, the lengthy scenes with the performers are less so, and Alvina herself is often a rather dull character (while other characters do not entirely come to life). Downbeat rather than tragic, I suspect that The Lost Girl is best left to Lawrence completists.

Tags: d h lawrence, James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the lost girl