Nevertheless, her belief in Lawrence was unshaken. In August 1916, when dining in the Cafe Royal in London, she overheard a nearby table deriding Lawrence's recently-published book of poems Amores. She confronted them and snatched the book away, before stomping out - an incident Lawrence put into Women in Love in the chapter "Gudrun in the Pompadour".

The Cafe Royal

The last time Lawrence and Katherine saw each other was in October 1918, after the Murrys had taken a house in Hampstead, only to find that the Lawrences were already ensconced nearby. When the painter Mark Gertler told Katherine that the Lawrences were "just around the corner", she confided to Ottoline her fear that quarrels would once more break out between Lawrence and Murry. "Every time the bell goes I hear Frieda's 'Vell Katherina - here ve are!' And I turn cold with horror."14

Yet a few days later Katherine also reported to Ottoline that Lawrence had been "running in and out all week".

The following year Katherine's chronic tubercular condition worsened, and she once more attempted to find relief in Italy. Lawrence and Frieda themselves went abroad in late 1919. A low-point in their relationship came a few months later when Katherine apparently received a letter from Lawrence, who was on Capri. (We only have Murry's - somewhat suspect - word for what might have been originally said, for the letter is lost, as is Katherine's letter to Murry reporting it.)

Murry quoted Katherine thus: "Lawrence sent me a letter today. He spat in my face and threw filth at me and said: 'I loathe you. You revolt festering in your consumption. You are a loathsome reptile - I hope you will die.'"15

Notwithstanding that, Katherine and Lawrence once more healed their fractured relationship, and on 20 January 1922 she noted in her Journal: "I suppose it is the effect of isolation that I can truly say I think of de la Mare, Tchehov, Kotelianksy, Tomlinson, Lawrence, Orage, every day. They are part of my life…."16

By the time Lawrence went to Australia in 1922, he had not seen Katherine for four years, but on arriving in Wellington, New Zealand, on his way from Australia to America, he sent a postcard to Katherine from her home town. He did not know her current whereabouts, so the postcard went via Ottoline. Convalescing with tuberculosis in Italy, Katherine reported to Murry: "I had a card from Lawrence today - just the one word (Ricordi) - how like him. I was glad to get it though."17

She also wrote to Murry, just before ending up at Gurdjieff's "clinic" at Fontainebleau, saying, "Yes, I care for Lawrence. I have thought of writing to him and trying to arrange a meeting after I leave Paris - suggesting I join them until the spring".18 But that was not to be, and Katherine died at the clinic on 9 January 1923.

Lawrence did not return to the text of the manuscript of "The Insurrection of Miss Houghton" until 1920, after he returned to Italy. He arranged for the MS to be posted to him in Capri, where in February 1920 - almost eight years

after he first began the novel - he started writing a third version, which he now called "Mixed Marriage".

However, he soon scrapped this version, and it was not until he had settled into the Fontana Vecchia in Taormina some months later that the fourth and ultimate version was started. (No trace of either "The Insurrection" or "Mixed Marrriage" survive.) As John Worthen points out in his Introduction to the CUP edition of The Lost Girl, this (final) version had little to do with the previous drafts. It was, in effect, a new novel. In May 1920, after only eight weeks' writing, what Lawrence finally decided to call The Lost Girl was finished, and sent off to a typist in Rome. It was published in the UK by Martin Secker on 25 November 1920.

OW, let us examine more closely the parallels between the heroine in The Lost Girl and Katherine Mansfield.

As I mentioned earlier, after returning to London in
August 1908, Katherine fell in love with the musician Garnet Trowell. She disappeared from her lodgings at Queens College, telling no-one of her whereabouts and joined Garnet Trowell, who was touring the north of England with the "Moody Manners"19 operatic troupe. Joining the troupe, she sang in the chorus, travelling by train from one town to the next, living in boarding houses and cooking meals in primitive kitchens - a brush with domesticity which she did not enjoy.

In the novel, Alvina Houghton, like Katherine, suddenly disappears from her family home, telling nobody of her whereabouts, and goes off to the north of England with the musical troupe, the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras. There she knuckles down to the hard slog of travelling by train from one set of digs to the next, cooking meals in boarding houses.

She and an Italian member of the troupe, Ciccio, become lovers. (Florence Cullen did not run off with a musical troupe - but Katherine Mansfield did.)

In the The Lost Girl there is a distinct change of character between the early Alvina (who is still similar to the fictional Elsa Culverwell) and the later Alvina Houghton. The two are quite dissimilar. This, I submit, is because Lawrence had switched the "model" of his heroine from Florence Cullen to Katherine Mansfield.

While still based on Florence Cullen, his heroine "spoke with a quiet, refined, almost convent voice".20 But a few pages later "her voice had a curious bronze-like resonance that acted straight on the nerves of her hearers,
unpleasantly on most English nerves."21 Why would Lawrence have Alvina's voice "acting unpleasantly" on English ears? Alvina was English. However, his "new" model, Katherine, was not. (People who knew Katherine found her colonial New Zealand accent, no matter that it was considerably toned down, unpleasant to their ears.)

Alvina's appearance also changes between the two depictions of the heroine. In the only remaining fragment of the earliest version of the novel ("Elsa Culverwell") Lawrence's heroine looks in the mirror and remarks: "Í was very ordinary, very quiet, rather shy…I was rather pale, and rather weedy, with dun-coloured hair. But I had an aristocratic hard cut of a face, with real blue eyes, that stared at myself in a sort of defiance."22

This description is carried over into the early pages of The Lost Girl, where Alvina is described as "a thin child with delicate limbs and face, and wide, grey-blue ironic eyes." But by page 21 of the final novel there is a marked change in her appearance. Alvina's former governess,

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