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This takes you to the heart and hearth of a Nottinghamshire coalmining village, for a single evening, c1909. There’s no big twist. The transformative event is no surprise. It’s about context, consequences, and self-awareness.

Contrasts

The opening paragraph pits the power of technology (“threats of speed�� and “inevitable movement�� as “the winding-engine rapped out its little spasms��) against ordinary people (a woman “insignificantly trapped�� between a hedge and racing train) and the natural world (the “withered oak��). The third paragraph foreshadows what's to come (“miners... passed like shadows��, a clawing vine, and “dishevelled pink chrysanthemums��).

Symbols

Symbolism can be a useful short-cut or something obscure that many readers miss. Lawrence makes it plain, without it feeling heavy-handed - even from the very first word: “odour��. Flowers normally have fragrance, scent, or perfume, whereas an odour is usually unpleasant, and often signals decay and death. Chrysanthemums traditionally symbolise love and they flower as late as November, when everything around is dying. This will not be a story of joy.


Image: “Dishevelled pink chrysanthemums��, long past their best ()

Setting

Elizabeth has two young children and is pregnant with a third. She is waiting for her husband to come home from the pit. She talks of him “bitterly�� (the word is used five times) because he’s probably frittering his meagre wages in the pub, as he has before. Like the woman between train and hedge, she’s trapped. Darkness and shadows pervade the little house. As she continues to wait, ��her anger was tinged with fear��.

Turning point

Really not a surprise, but (view spoiler)[ news comes of an accident. Elizabeth is immediately practical: wondering if she’ll be able to keep Walter off the drink if he’s merely injured, and how she’ll cope if she’s widowed (no unencumbered happy remarriage, as her recently-widowed father is planning), fully aware of how much her children need her. Her mother-in-law, like the neighbour and unlike Elizabeth, speaks in lower-class dialect. She acknowledges her son’s faults as a drunken husband, but blames Elizabeth.
��You've had a sight o' trouble with him, Elizabeth, you have indeed. But he was a jolly enough lad wi' me, he was, I can assure you.��
When it comes to washing and dressing the body, she’s almost competitive about it and Elizabeth feels pressure to grieve the way her mother-in-law expects. (hide spoiler)]


Image: Hucknall Torkard colliery, a few miles from Brinsley, at the time of this story ()

Chrysanthemums

Earlier, Elizabeth had plonked some wan chrysanthemums in a vase, after she chided her little boy for throwing petals on the path.
��The air was cold and damp... The candle-light glittered on the lustre-glasses, on the two vases that held some of the pink chrysanthemums, and on the dark mahogany. There was a cold, deathly smell of chrysanthemums in the room.��

Later, the vase is broken. A trivial, commonplace accident, but laden with meaning.


Image: A surreal take on a broken vase, by Erik Johansson ()

Elizabeth comes to realise how little she and Walter knew and understood each other:
��And she knew what a stranger he was to her. In her womb was ice of fear, because of this separate stranger with whom she had been living as one flesh.��

Quotes

�� “The withered oak leaves dropped noiselessly.��

�� “A large bony vine clutched at the house, as if to claw down the tiled roof.��

�� “As the mother watched her son's sullen little struggle with the wood, she saw herself in his silence and pertinacity; she saw the father in her child's indifference to all but himself.��

�� “It was chrysanthemums when I married him, and chrysanthemums when you were born, and the first time they ever brought him home drunk, he'd got brown chrysanthemums in his buttonhole.��

�� “She knew she submitted to life, which was her immediate master. But from death, her ultimate master, she winced with fear and shame.��

See also

This is good, but I didn't enjoy it as much as many others of his, so 3.5*, rounded down.

�� I’ve reviewed several of DHL’s short stories, HERE. Many of them have themes that overlap with those here, including autobiographical elements.

�� Chrysanthemums feature prominently in Sons and Lovers, which I reviewed HERE.

�� A couple of years after he published this story, Lawrence adapted it for the stage, as The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd.

�� There’s a short film from 2002, which I’ve not watched. See .

�� This is set in Brinsley Colliery - the same mine Lawrence’s father worked at. His mother, like Elizabeth, was middle class (and determined her son wouldn’t follow in his father’s footsteps). Monty Python were probably thinking of Lawrence in their sketch about a working-class playwright and his coalmining son. See .

Short story club

I reread this as one of the stories in The Art of the Short Story, by Dana Gioia, from which I'm aiming to read one story a week with The Short Story Club, starting 2 May 2022.

You can read this story .

You can join the group here.