The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd
by D. H. Lawrence
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The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd, written immediately after Sons and Lovers, is one of D. H. Lawrence's most significant early works. The play, Lawrence's first, is the alter ego of the story "Odour of Chrysanthemums" and, like the short story, deals with a catastrophe in the lives of a coal mining family. Drawing upon the intensity of events that unfold in the miner's kitchen, the play explores a marriage bowed under the weight of a husband's drinking and infidelity and peers into the strange, show more burgeoning relationship between the neglected wife, Mrs. Holroyd, and the young electrician in whom she seeks emotional refuge. First published in 1914, The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd is a bare tracing of the ways in which a marriage has gone wrong. show lessTags
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Dank, dark, Northern angst set among miners. Lawrence's speciality. Mrs. Holroyd didn't marry for love and didn't find it in her marriage with the husband who humiliated her for his own amusement and beat her because she was his slave. But dawning happiness with another and the sudden fulfilment of wishing her brutish, brutal husband dead brought out the guilt in her. Years of ill-treatment fell away as she washed his corpse and all she could do was sob out her regrets and eulogise the dead.
Silly cow.
Silly cow.
Bittersweet, more bitter than sweet. The bonds between a married couple, however unhappy and brutal, are worthy of mourning at its final, unredeemable end.
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899+ Works 60,719 Members
D(avid) H(erbert) Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885. His father was a coal miner and Lawrence grew up in a mining town in England. He always hated the mines, however, and frequently used them in his writing to represent both darkness and industrialism, which he despised because he felt it was scarring the English countryside. Lawrence show more attended high school and college in Nottingham and, after graduation, became a school teacher in Croyden in 1908. Although his first two novels had been unsuccessful, he turned to writing full time when a serious illness forced him to stop teaching. Lawrence spent much of his adult life abroad in Europe, particularly Italy, where he wrote some of his most significant and most controversial novels, including Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterly's Lover. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, who had left her first husband and her children to live with him, spent several years touring Europe and also lived in New Mexico for a time. Lawrence had been a frail child, and he suffered much of his life from tuberculosis. Eventually, he retired to a sanitorium in Nice, France. He died in France in 1930, at age 44. In his relatively short life, he produced more than 50 volumes of short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel journals, and letters, in addition to the novels for which he is best known. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Related movies
- The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd (1974/I | IMDb); Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd (1976 | IMDb)
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- Members
- 39
- Popularity
- 748,658
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (4.13)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 16
- UPCs
- 2
- ASINs
- 3
