Beyond Odd Women and Old Maids: D. H. Lawrence’s The Lost Girl, Decadent Heroines, and the Challenge to Modern Tragedy

Abstract

Critics generally have viewed D. H. Lawrence’s novel The Lost Girl (1920) as a vexing fictional work that, with its resemblance to the fiction of Arnold Bennett and Compton Mackenzie, seems to eschew the modernist experiment that Lawrence had boldly embarked on in his other fiction of the period. Yet the story of Alvina Houghton, the daughter of a struggling Midlands draper and an “odd woman” who seems to reject marriage, only superficially follows the examples set by these writers. Rather, the novel’s heroine, with her ten suitors and her restless need to dominate her lovers, echoes the aspirations of the turn-of-the-century Aestheticist movement and resembles more the heroines of Decadent fiction, with their indomitable, insatiable erotic requirements. Furthermore, in rejecting the social realm that is so crucial to realist fiction of the period, Lawrence rejects the idea that unmarried women face a tragic personal dilemma.