D.H. Lawrence: A Study of the Short Fiction

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1996 by Brian Murray

Interest in Lawrence's life remains wide and is, it appears, unending; every year more biographies and biography-based studies appear. In this context, Thornton seems to be arguing uphill, dissecting against the grain. Some readers will surely suggest that Thornton's readings are in their own way too inventive, that his departure from traditional interpretations has left him too wide of the mark.

But many more are likely to consider Thornton's careful and detailed approach not only provocative but convincing. His readings of "England, My England" and "The Woman Who Rode Away" are especially worth noting. In Thornton's hands, the former becomes much more than a biting portrait of Madeline Meynell Lucas's aristocratic family. And the latter emerges, intriguingly, as a story about "two processes of devolution, one individual, the other cultural," and thus as more than Lawrence's "mean-spirited attempt" to "vent his spleen against women or primitives."