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What surprised and appealed most about the two dozen stories gathered here, spanning Lawrence’s writing life, was their variety - of style, subject, genre, language, and atmosphere. They are too diverse to read many in quick succession. Conversely, reading them with only a short gap between stories reveals recurring themes.

Unloving mothers



The most common motif is that of parents, particularly mothers, who don’t or can’t love their children. They are not wicked caricatures. They are solicitous - sometimes excessively - in ensuring that practical needs are met: food, clothes, education. But what happiness or reassurance can there be when all you really crave is a kind word, a tender touch, and above all, empathy and love?

One little boy is “a torment of responsibility�, though his mother is probably suffering from post-natal depression. Another couple:
�Had one little boy, whom they loved as parents should love their children, but whom they wisely refrained from fastening upon, to build their lives on him. No, no, they must have their own lives!�
Even an apparently loving mother tells her adult son, about his unplanned existence:
�You were lucky. It was my misfortune�
and proceeds to tell him what a burden he has always been.

In the worst cases, a parent’s inability to love triggers madness and mortality in a parent or child.

Class bound(aries)



Lawrence was a working class lad who joined the literati. He was on the periphery of , though often critical of it. He must have been conscious of the boundaries he had breached. Maybe he doubted his own achievement: Hadrian, in the story “You Touched Me� was adopted and:
�Matilda had longed to make a gentleman of him, but he refused to be made.�

Many characters here are acutely aware of, and often constrained by the rigidity of class and consequent expectations. As an adult, Hadrian goes to Canada to escape the burden of his humble roots as a “charity boy�.

Money matters most when you don’t have enough to maintain your position in society. That’s at the cold heart of “The Rocking Horse Winner�. But those who have both position and money are not much freer, despite their sometimes smug superiority.

There is potential tragedy for those who cannot consider marrying beneath themselves. For them, spinsterdom lurks: a ghost of the future they can see, but not exorcise.

Oxymorons - or merely contrasts?

Lawrence loves counter-intuitive imagery: cold fire, dark flames, black blood, blue sun. Most of all, he often asserts that hate is inextricably part of love.

Marriage for the wrong reasons, awful reasons



Some of the marriages here made me uncomfortable. Perhaps this is where the age of the book shows.

People, real and fictional, past and present, marry for all sorts of reasons, some more noble than others. Who am I to judge (assuming I even know the truth)?

A marriage of convenience is morally neutral, as long as both parties understand the terms. Settling for "Second Best" (the actual title of one of the stories) may be a lot better than nothing - or else slow tragedy for all involved (in this collection, I think there’s some of each).

Nevertheless, comparing sexual arousal with sleep by saying “If you wake a man up, he can’t go to sleep again� sounds rather like justifying date rape on the basis a man cannot stop once he’s started. Even worse, that story has a (hideous, implausible) “happy� ending.

The grass is always greener



When aspiration and desire become insatiable, present pleasure becomes impossible. Madness can result.

This is the explicit message of several of the stories, and a possible outcome for protagonists in some of the others.

“Be careful what you wish for�, as the saying goes.

Blue


The first story that I read (not the first in the book), “Sun�, was notable for the ubiquity of blue. Not just expected hues of eyes, sea, sky, and clothes, but particularly the blue of the sun, light, and flames: the sun’s “blue pulsing roundness, whose outer edges streamed brilliance. Pulsing with marvellous blue, and alive� He faced down to her with blue body of fire.� Another time, facing a human man:
�The blue fire running through her� the fire flowing between them like the blue streaming fire from the heart of the sun.�

Maybe that primed me, but blue leaped off the pages, Lawrence’s words, licking my eyes with warm-cool flames. I was consumed in a benign and sometimes sensuous conflagration.

In contrast, “Fanny and Annie� was burnished red by the town furnaces:
�The red lights flared over the deepening darkness.�

Eyes

The colour, clarity, and changing mood of eyes are frequently mentioned and always significant, sometimes unsubtly so. This is especially obvious in "The Fox"; my review (link below) lists many examples.

Exclamation marks!

Lawrence is sometimes exuberant with exclamation marks, to an extent that twenty first century grammar mavens often criticise. I’m no maven.




Reviews of individual stories

I’ve tried to reflect the range stories in the ones I’ve chosen to review individually:

Sun, 5*
Sensual awakening from carnal communing with the sun.

Things, 4*
Satire about trying to reject materialism and live for beauty.

The Man Who Loved Islands, 4*
A fairy tale study of obsession.

Love Among the Haystacks, 4*
Harvesting cherries.

The Rocking Horse Winner, 4*.
A ghostless ghost story.

The Fox, 3*.
Happiness is unattainable.

The Ladybird, 4*.
Floral, fiery, animal, earthy passion.

Odour of Chrysanthemums, 3*.
An evening in the pit village of the same colliery that DHL's father worked at.

Image sources
Pages of book taking flight:

Child with disappearing parents:

Frost Report class sketch - image:

Frost Report class sketch - to watch:

Balance money and heart:

Green and brown grass:

Blue flames: