Others have mentioned Katherine"s criticism of Lawrence's use of the word "trill" to describe how Alvina sensed she was pregnant - perhaps Katherine's strong reaction to the use of the word dragged up memories of her own pregnancy. But she goes on: "Earth-closets too. Do they exist, qua earth-closets?...to build an earth-closet because the former one was so exposed. No."

Her singling-out of the matter of the earth-closet is a reference to an incident in the novel when Ciccio has taken Alvina to live in a hovel in his remote Italian alpine village. This is described in a paragraph in The Lost Girl: "Ciccio...was building a little earth-closet also; the obvious and unscreened place outside was impossible."34

Why did Katherine bring this minor incident up? And why did she feign ignorance of such sanitary arrangements? The reference in the novel clearly originated in an incident at Higher Tregerthen in Cornwall when she and Murry were about to take up residence in the cottage alongside Lawrence and Frieda. Lawrence had entered into a frenzy of domestic arrangements, including organising the rearrangement of the outdoor earth-closet.

He wrote to his landlord, Captain John Short, on 23 March 1916: 35
 

"There only remains the question of the W.C. The one that stands already is not very satisfactory. Surely it should have a bucket, that it might be emptied quite cleanly. It is a pity it stands there at all, spoiling the only bit of ground. And it would never do to stand another beside it: one might as well, at that rate, live in a public-lavatory. I can see Katherine Murry's face, if she saw two W.Cs staring at her every time she came out of the door or looked out of the window. It would never do."


TO SUM UP

AWRENCE'S creative genius took aspects of real people and real events and reshaped them into fiction.

That he found inspiration in Katherine Mansfield is not surprising. She was a particularly striking and unusual person. He got to know her very closely over a number of years, and there was a strong affinity between them. I contend that much of Alvina Houghton is an amalgam of Florence Cullen and Katherine Mansfield.

Yet it is Katherine who ends up as Lawrence's Lost Girl.

© Sandra Jobson Darroch 2002




End Notes

1. D.H. Lawrence, The Lost Girl. John Worthen, ed, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
2 'Elsa Culverwell', published in the CUP edition of The Lost Girl.
3. The Lost Girl. John Worthen, ed. Explanatory Notes 140:28
4. The Lost Girl. John Worthen, ed. Explanatory Notes 113.2
5 http://www.maoridictionary.co.nz/ based on Te Aka M?ori-English, English- M?ori Dictionary and Index. See end note 6
6. Katherine Mansfield, The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, Complete edition Margaret Scott, ed, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2002), Notebook 2, p.166 and Unbound Papers, poem "In the Darkness", p. 125. Katherine listed a similar word in her Notebook: "range tewera".
7. The Letters of D.H. Lawrence General Editor, James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), To Sally Hopkin, 23 December 1912, p.490
8. The following biographical details are based principally on:
Antony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (London: Jonathan Cape, 1980).
Claire Tomalin Katherine Mansfield A Secret Life (London: Penguin Books, 1988).
Jeffrey Meyers, Katheine Mansfield A Biography (London: Hamish Hamilton. 1978).
D.H. Lawrence, Letters
Vincent O"Sullivan and Margaret Scott, eds, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984-2008).
9. Both Katherine and Ottoline had been tutored by John Adam Cramb, who, I discovered when researching my biography of Ottoline, had written a novel based on Ottoline.
10. This fragment, published for the first time in the CUP edition of The Lost Girl,is in the Morris Library, Univeristy of Southern Illinois at Carbondale. (Note on the text facing page 343 and note 343.1. CUP edition, The Lost Girl.)
11 Katherine Mansfield, Journal, ed. J. Middleton Murry, (New York: Knopf, 1946), 20 September 1918,
12. Mansfield, Journal, (London: Constable, 1927), 9 January 1915, p 20.

 


13. C.J. Stevens, Lawrence at Tregerthen (New York: The Whitstone Publishing Company, 1988).
14. Vincent O"Sullivan and Margaret Scott, eds, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
Mansfield Letters Vol 2, To Ottoline Morrell, 8 October 1918, p 179.
15. Alpers, p 310, and John Middleton Murry, The Letters of John Middleton Murry to Katherine Mansfiel, (London: Constable, 1983), p. 268 and notes on p. 269 re Lawrence's letter.
16. Mansfield Journal, 20 January 1922, p. 223.
17. The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). To John Middleton Murry, 10 September 1922; D.H. Lawrence, The Letters of D.H. Lawrence Vol 4, p. 283 note to letter 2565.
18. Mansfield, Letters, 13 October,1922.
19. Alpers, pp. 69 and p. 92.
20. Lost Girl, p. 20.
21. Lost Girl, p. 23.
22. Culverwell", p. 356.
23. Lost Girl, p. 21.
24. Myers, p. 63
25. Lawrence, Women in Love, p. 9.
26. D. H. Lawrence 'Smile' in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories (London:Martin Secker 1928), p. 110.
27. Mansfield, Journal , September 20, 1918, p.99.
28. Meyers, p. 96.
29. Compton Mackenzie, Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett (London: Hutchinson, No Date).
30. Lawrence to Mackenzie. Lawrence Letters, 10 May 1920, p. 521
31. . 'Touch and G'o, Act 1, Scene 11, p. 331. (Lawrence sent Katherine a copy of the play but she did not seem to recognize herself or Murry.
32. John Middleton Murry, Between Two Worlds (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935)p. 413.
33. Katherine Mansfield The Scrapbook of Katherine Mansfield, ed. J. Middleton Murry (New York: Knopf 1940),pp. 182-184.
34. Lost Girl, p. 323.
35, Lawrence, Letters, Vol XX, 25 March 1916, p. 585.

 

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