which he had been writing at Higher Tregerthen, when Katherine had been literally next door.

Lawrence would have seen a number of similarities between his intended heroine, Alvina, and his Higher Tregerthen neighbour, Katherine. Both were daughters of prominent businessmen. Both had rebelled against their bourgeois backgrounds, and thus become outcasts. More immediately, he had observed at first hand Katherine's struggles to free herself of dependence on John Middleton-Murry - a matter which much concerned Lawrence at that time.

Significantly, a number of events in the novel also mirror events in Katherine's life. Katherine Mansfield, nee Beauchamp8, was born into an upper-middle-class New Zealand family in 1888. In 1903 her wealthy, anglophile parents sent her to London to complete her education. She enrolled (as Ottoline had before her)9 at Queens College, where she was inculcated with proto-feminist ideals, which, when she returned home in 1906, led her to rebel against the bourgeois society of her parents' provincial Wellington.

However, in 1908, fed up with the antipodes, she prevailed on her parents to send her back to London, where she again took up residence at Queens College. In August that year she fell in love with a musician, Garnet Trowell. She ran off with Trowell and became pregnant by him, then hastily married another man, George Bowden, before fleeing to Germany, where she suffered a miscarriage.

On her return to London she lived as a single woman, experimenting with relationships and attempting to pursue a literary career. She had some early, promising short stories published which displayed a talent which was to burgeon a few years later with the publication of "The Garden Party", "Prelude" and other highly-regarded short stories. She also acted in early films, her enigmatic, sphinx-like beauty appealing to directors. Then in 1912 she met John Midleton-Murry, and they become lovers.

That same, tumultuous year, Lawrence, who had run off with Frieda Weekley (or visa-versa), had begun

writing the first draft of what eventually became The Lost Girl. He first called it "Scargill Street", then "Elsa Culverwell", and 28 pages of this early draft survive10. By early March 1913 he had renamed the work "The Insurrection of Alvina Houghton" and it was apparently half-written. However, Lawrence was worried about what he saw as its overt sexual references, and did not want it to jeopardise his new autobiographical novel, Sons and Lovers. He stopped writing the "Alvina" text and a few months later took the manuscript with him to Bavaria, where he left it with Frieda's family. The text remained there until after the end of the War.

A few months later, having put "The Insurrection of Alvina Houghton" aside, and living in Italy with Frieda and revising proofs of Sons and Lovers, Lawrence received a letter from Katherine, whom at that time he did not know.

She was working with Murry on a literary journal, Rhythm, and looking for contributions from promising young

writers. Lawrence offered a short story - free. This led to Lawrence calling in to the office of what had been renamed The Blue Review on his return to London a few months later. An immediate friendship was struck up.

Both of them were, in effect, foreigners to the London literary scene (then dominated by Georgian locals). Yet they shared a number of things in common. She was a colonial outsider; he was from a working class mining town. Katherine later acknowledged: "I am more like Lawrence than anybody. We are unthinkably alike, in fact."11

Soon Lawrence and Frieda and Katherine and Murry were inseparable. That idyllic summer of 1913 the two couples saw a lot of each other, before they all escaped to the continent again in the autumn. The following spring, however, the foursome were back in London, and refreshing their friendship. A regular matter they talked about was Lawrence's evolving dream to exit England and establish a community of like-minded souls - his "Rananim" - in America, or the South Seas, or almost anywhere other than the British Isles. Needless to say, Katherine's colonial prejudices lay in a very different direction: "I felt very antagonistic to the whole affair," she noted in her Journal.12

World War, however, was soon upon them, and the clouds began to gather. An incident at Christmas 1914 provided Lawrence with the opportunity to portray Katherine in a lighter context. The foursome were staying at Gilbert Cannan's windmill cottage in Buckinghamshire when someone suggested putting on an improvised play. Things got out of hand - the gathering was so inebriated that they were unable to carve the Christmas pork - and the play descended towards a bacchanalia, with Katherine flirting outrageously with Gertler. This incident gave Lawrence the episode in Women in Love where Gudrun goes off with the artist Loerke.

Another significant incident occurred that evening. Katherine had been flirting with the idea of leaving Murry and going off to Paris to join a French-Corsican poet, Francis Carco.

Francis Carco

Lawrence had been encouraging her to do so, assuring her that the swarthy Carco would prove to be a more virile lover than Murry. Katherine in fact carried out her intention, and rendezvoused with her poet friend in Paris. However, she soon returned to Murry, somewhat to Lawrence's disgust. (An echo of this was to surface later in The Lost Girl.)

The Lawrence-Murry friendship sailed serenely on through 1915, particularly after Lawrence, Katherine and Murry became involved with the Bloomsburies, and went on to sample the attractions and divertissements of Lady Ottoline Morrell's Arcadian salon at Garsington. The Lawrences and the Murrys - still very close - continued to see a lot of one another in 1916. In October that year, however, the increasingly-impoverished Lawrences (Sons and Lovers had not been a commercial success) were obliged to rusticate at Higher Tregerthen in Cornwall. From there Lawrence invited Katherine and Murry to join them. Typically, he busied himself painting rooms and getting what he called the "Tower" ready for Katherine to write in.

Little did the Murrys know that at that very time Lawrence was writing Women in Love, and partly basing the characters of Gudrun Brangwen and Gerald Crich on them. It is also interesting to note that while he awaited the Murrys' arrival, Lawrence also made a fitful attempt to retrieve the partly-written text of an earlier version of The Lost Girl from Bavaria. But hostilities with Germany made that impracticable.

The ménage a quatre at Higher Tregerthen did not, despite Lawrence's nest-building efforts, prove a happy one. Increasingly, the war was closing in. Frieda was pining for the children she had left behind, while Lawrence seemed to prefer the company of a local farm boy (when the Lawrences weren't throwing pots and pans at each other).13 As well, Lawrence was exploring his new-found interest in "dark gods", which took the form of trying to establish a "blood-brotherhood" with Murry (to the disapproval of Katherine). Finally, it became all too much for Katherine, and she and Murry decamped to a less-remote cottage on the other side of Cornwall.

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