Miss Frost, describes Alvina as having "a gargoyle" face…"she would see the eyes rolling strangely, and then Miss Frost would feel that never, never had she known anything so utterly alien."23

When Katherine got to know the Bloomsburies, after first meeting them in artist Dorothy Brett"s studio in November 1915, a number of them discussed her appearance.24

Dorothy Brett remarked on Katherine's "mask-like composure". Lytton Strachey described Katherine as "an odd satirical woman behind a regular mask of a face".

Strachey wrote to Virginia Woolf: "I may add that she has an ugly impassive mask of a face - cut in wood, with brown hair and brown eyes very far apart; and a sharp and slightly vulgarly- fanciful intellect sitting behind it." (Katherine's penchant for mockery was often remarked on.) An echo of this "gargoyle look" also appears in Women in Love where "Gudrun looked at Ursula with a mask-like expressionless face."25, and also in Lawrence's short story, Smile. 26

But appearance is not the only parallel between the fictional Alvina and the real-life Katherine. Both had sharp tempers. Geoffrey Meyers notes that Dorothy Brett remarked on Katherine's rapid and disconcerting changes in mood… "ironic ruthlessness"…"satirical wit" and said Katherine had a "a tongue like a knife". Dora Carrington described her as having "the language of a fishwife".

And Virginia Woolf, despite being a great admirer of Katherine and her writing, said cattily that Katherine "dressed like a tart and behaved like a bitch."

Lawrence in The Lost Girl says that Alvina had outbursts of temper, with the addition of sudden fits of "boisterous hilarity" and "mad bursts of hilarious jeering." (Katherine, too, was known for her ill temper.) She once wrote: "I think the only thing which is really 'serious' about me, really 'bad'. Really incurable, is my temper."27

However, it is in the theme of The Lost Girl where Katherine makes her greatest contribution to the novel. Lawrence saw in Katherine the personification of the dilemma of the modern woman, and which he then played out in The Lost Girl. Lawrence had observed Katherine's repeated attempts to leave Murry, and he likened her role as the "mother" to Murry's "child"28. He had suggested

Katherine should look for a more manly, sensual man - perhaps like Ciccio, the swarthy Italian with whom Alvina runs off in The Lost Girl. Perhaps there is a veiled reference here to Katherine's brief affair with the swarthy poet, Francis Carco. Surely there is an echo of the name Ciccio in the name Carco.

But Lawrence had some misgivings about this. Was Ciccio the solution to Alvina's dilemma? Lawrence confessed he was troubled by Alvina. He was concerned that he hadn't found a solution to her quest for independence. He could see similarities between Alvina and the heroine of his friend Compton Mackenzie's recently-published novel, The Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett,29 a picaresque story of a young girl questing for independence. In a letter to Mackenzie in May 1920 Lawrence wrote that he was "terrified of my Alvina who marries a Ciccio". Referring to Mackenzie's heroine, Sylvia, who married an upper-

middle-class Englishman, but finally decided to leave him, he writes: "I believe neither of us has found a way out of the labyrinth. How we hang on to the marriage clue! Doubt if its really a way out….30. Lawrence leaves Alvina still married to Ciccio, but he also leaves a question over the future of that marriage - as he did over the relationship between Katherine and Murry. He summed up the complicated relationships between himself, Murry and Katherine in fictional form in his 1920 play, Touch and Go31. Anabel Wrath (a Katherine/Gudrun-figure and Oliver Turton (a Lawrence/Birkin figure) are talking about the failure of their relationship with Gerald Barlow (a Murry/Gerald Crich-figure):

ANABEL: But we were a vicious triangle, Oliver -
you must admit it.
OLIVER: You mean my friendship with Gerald went
against you?
ANABEL: Yes. And your friendship with me went
against Gerald.
OLIVER: So I am the devil in the piece.
ANABEL: You see, Oliver, Gerald loved you far too
well ever to love me altogether. He loved us both.
But the Gerald who loved you so dearly, old, old
friends as you were, and trusted you, he turned a
terrible face of contempt on me….He had a passion
for me but he loved you.

Murry reviewed the novel in his literary magazine, The Athenaeum, in December 1920. It was not a favourable critique. Indeed, it was vitriolic.32 By the time the novel was published Katherine was too ill to review it, but she recorded her feelings about it in her Scrapbook, and these echo Murry's opinion that Alvina and Ciccio "behaved like animals".

Yet Katherine apparently detected no overt parallel with herself.33 She wrote: "Lawrence denies his humanity. He denies the powers of the imagination. He denies life - I mean human life. His hero and heroine are non-human. They are animals on the prowl." And she continued: "Oh, don't forget where Alvina feels a trill in her bowels, and discovers herself with child. A TRILL. What does that mean?"