my antipodean ear, the name 'Tawara' sounded more Polynesian/Maori than Red Indian. John Worthen, the editor of the CUP edition of the novel, points to James Fenimore Cooper and other authors as possible sources for the Natcha-Kee-Tawara 'Red Indian' troupe, though he could find no precise reference, deciding that Lawrence had invented the name 21. Antony Alpers, himself a New Zealander, accepted Natcha-Kee-Tawara as a Red Indian name, as have other Mansfield biographers, such as Claire Tomalin and Jeffrey Meyers.

Recently, while re-reading Lawrence's works of this period, I consulted a Maori-English Dictionary and found that 'Tawara' is indeed a Maori word, meaning 'flavour, taste, tenor.' 22 Of course, Katherine was no stranger to the Maori language. Her father Harold Beauchamp was an amateur Maori linguist, while in 1907 she herself made a list of Maori words in her Notebook. 23 This insight led me to re-read The Lost Girl with fresh eyes. Although I am aware of the dangers of saying that Lawrence 'put' Katherine Mansfield into The Lost Girl, I want to suggest that some of the elements of Alvina Houghton in that novel are clearly based on Katherine - a probability that invests the Lawrence-Katherine relationship with new significance, for I argue that Katherine is in fact Lawrence's Lost Girl.

The original genesis of The Lost Girl came at the end of 1912. On 23 December Lawrence declared: 'I shall do a novel about Love triumphant one day. I shall do my work for women, better than the suffrage.' 24 The first draft, 'Elsa Culverwell' 25 (originally 'Scargill Street'), was abandoned after 26 pages. Lawrence started on a fresh text a few weeks later, changing its working title to 'The Insurrection of Miss Houghton', and the name of his heroine to Alvina Houghton. It is accepted that Lawrence based much of Alvina's family and associates on the Cullens, a well-known Eastwood family. The initial guise of Elsa/Alvina was obviously based on Florence Cullen, the daughter of the family, who left Eastwood to become a nurse, but who later, like Alvina, returned to play the piano in her father's ill-fated cinema. 26

By early March 1913 'Insurrection' was apparently half-written (this second draft is lost). However, Lawrence was worried over its overt sexual references. He did not want it to jeopardise his third novel, Sons and Lovers, which was just about to be published. So he stopped writing, but took the 'Insurrection' text with him to Bavaria later that year, where he left it with Frieda's family. There it remained, untouched, for the next seven years.

Lawrence first thought about reviving 'Insurrection' in 1916 27, but the MS was still in Bavaria with Frieda's family, and inaccessible due to the war. It was not until 1919 that Lawrence, by then in Italy, arranged for it to be posted to him in Capri, where in February 1920 be began writing a third version, which he now provisionally called 'Mixed Marriage'. However, he soon scrapped this (it, too, has not survived), 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. (At this point he was thinking of calling it 'The Bitter Cherry'.) In May 1920, after only eight weeks' writing, what he 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.

It is my contention that Lawrence, after having met and got to know Katherine, had decided that Katherine, rather than Florence Cullen, was a better model for the later Alvina, the young 'liberated' woman who had been struggling for independence in his abandoned 1913 text. I suggest that a comparison between some episodes in The Lost Girl and events in Katherine's life supports this view, for example:

In 'Elsa Culverwell' the heroine describes herself: 'I was very ordinary, very quiet, rather shy. I was rather pale, and rather weedy, with dun-coloured hair, with real blue eyes, that stared at myself, in a sort of defiance.' 31. When she was nearly 20, Elsa described herself again: 'I was not very handsome: cold looking, with my slightly aquiline nose and my steady blue eyes. I had dun-coloured hair, I was pale. But I had the knack of looking a lady.' 32.

In the The Lost Girl, there is a distinct change between the early Alvina, who is still similar to Elsa, and the later, post-Elsa-Culverwell Alvina. The two, I would argue, are quite dissimilar. This, I believe, is because Lawrence had switched the 'model' of his heroine from Florence Cullen to Katherine Mansfield. Before the change (while still based on Florence Cullen/Elsa Culverwell), Alvina '[...] spoke with a quiet, refined, almost convent voice' 33 A few pages later, however, 'her voice had a curious bronze-like resonance that acted straight on the nerves of her hearers, unpleasantly on most English nerves [...]' 34 Alvina's appearance also changes between the two depictions of the heroine. In what we can now call the early, pre-Katherine version, Alvina is described as having been:

a thin child with delicate limbs and face, and wide, grey-blue ironic eyes. Even as a small girl she had that odd, ironic tilt of the eyelids which gave her a look as if she were hanging back in mockery. If she were, she was quite unaware of it […] 35

 

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