writing it. However, as Lawrence had circulated the manuscript of Women in Love to Ottoline around November 1916, and she had then told many of her friends about it, including Katherine - long before its publication - it would seem that Murry is not completely truthful about this (as, I suspect, he may not be in other matters concerning Katherine). Murry also said that the character of Gudrun did not reflect anything of Katherine's personality and was an indication of how little Lawrence understood her. But he did concede: 'it probably is true that Lawrence found the germ of Gerald in me.'
By the time The Lost Girl was published Katherine was too ill to review the novel, but she recorded her feelings about it in her Scrapbook, and they repeat Murry's ('animals') image. However, she apparently detected no overt parallel with herself: 53

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. They do not feel: they scarcely speak. There is not one memorable word. They submit to their physical response and for the rest go veiled, blind - faceless, mindless. This is the doctrine of mindlessness.

She also saw no parallel between the wanderings of Alvina and her own early life: 'The whole is false - ashes. 'The preposterous Indian troupe of four young men is - a fake.' Nor any similarity to her pregnancy and Alvina's: 'Oh, don't forget where Alvina feels a trill in her bowels, and discovers herself with child. A TRILL. What does that mean?' 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? No. I might describe the queer noises coming from one when old Grandpa X was there - very strange cries and moans, and how the women who were washing stopped and shook their heads and pitied him, and even the children didn't laugh. Yes, I can imagine that. But that's not the same as to build an earth-closet because the former one was so exposed. No.

Her singling out of the matter of the water-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. He decides that the open air lavatory arrangements there were not suitable for an English lady of Alvina's status and sets about making a more salubrious arrangement. This is described in two very minor sentences in The Lost Girl:

' Ciccio worked all day on the land or round about. He was building a little earth closet also; the obvious and unscreened place outside was impossible.' 54

Why did Katherine bring this incident up? It no doubt refers to an incident at Higher Tregerthen when she and Murry were about to live in the cottage alongside Lawrence and Frieda. Lawrence, had entered into a frenzy of domestic arrangements, and organising the rearrangement of the water closet. He wrote to his landlord, Captain John Short, on 23 March 1916:

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 Murrys face, if she saw two W.C's staring at her every time she came out of the door or looked out of the window. It would never do. 55

My analysis of the 'Katherine elements' in the character of Alvina Houghton demonstrate that Katherine influenced Lawrence's work more than hitherto recognised. But what influence did Lawrence and Katherine have on each other's writing? Their approach was quite different. Where Lawrence could be called more of a fresco painter, Katherine was a miniaturist. When he writes about Gudrun's 'exquisite carvings' in Women in Love, Lawrence may have been thinking of Katherine's writing:

Isn't it queer that she always likes little things? -- she must always work small things […] She likes to look through the wrong end of the opera glasses, and see the world that way [ -] ' 56

Lawrence played out his theories and ideas in his novels, which in some parts are more like morality plays than novels. Katherine's style was to refine her message to complete simplicity and subtlety. Yet there were also some similarities in their technique (although not influenced by one another) - both were intensely visual and impressionistic; both could describe landscape and nature superbly (indeed, some of Katherine's very early writings in her Notebook 57 about the New Zealand rivers and forests she saw during her 1907 trip to the North Island, although unpolished, rival, in my opinion, some of Lawrence's best landscape writing such as in Sea and Sardinia 58 and Mr Noon 59).

Both, in their different ways, pushed English literature forward into new territory. However, I do not think Lawrence influenced Katherine's writing. Her main early literary mentor was Chekhov, not Lawrence, though by the time she wrote Prelude she had begun to slough off Chekhov's influence. After that, she was striking out into new territory on her own. . Katherine, in Prelude did something new in literature - in shifting the focus of the story from the point of view of one character to that of another and then to another. It seems to me that In doing such sliding from one character to another, she was writing in a cinematic way, presaging the techniques used in modern screen writing In Prelude, the reader is led from one character to another and the story cuts from one character to another like a film. This technique is repeated and refined in some of her other stories such as 'Je ne Parle pas Francais' 60 and is examined in depth by Sydney Janet Kaplin. 61.

It may even be that Lawrence was a bad influence on Katherine. Indeed, Lawrence's stronger personality may have been the cause of her writer's block during the time they were in Cornwall. Lawrence

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