D.H. Lawrenece The Prussian Officer and Other Stories

Lawrence's three earliest short stories, written in 1907, showed him as a potentially successful short story writer. "Amusing" (radically rewritten later as "The White Stocking") is an "incident" story where the whole narration leads to and concentrates around the incident of a woman drawing out, to her embarrassment, a white stocking instead of a pocket handkerchief at a ball. "Legend", later revised and re-titled "A Fragment of Stained Glass", is what may be called a fable, for in it Lawrence tries to make the supernatural explicable in order to draw out a moral. "A Prelude" is a romance showing a woman wooing her would-be husband by Christmas caroling, with another woman friend, outside his window. As early as 1907 Lawrence had inverted the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene with an eye to recasting gender roles in courtship. The stories show the same preoccupation with relationships that Lawrence had described to Jessie Chambers as his starting point for the novel he was writing at that time, ”The White Peacock• 1911 ('E.T.' 103).

In looking at Lawrence's earlier short stories as a whole two aspects are worth considering. First there is what critics consider to be an apparent discrepancy between the mature polished early stories published in the Prussian Officer collection and the naive, experimental ones that were never published during Lawrence's lifetime. These are the stories that appeared in the posthumous collections: Love Among the Haystacks (1930) The stories included in Love Among the Haystacks are: "Love Among the Haystacks" (1911); "A Chapel Among the Mountains" (1912); "A Hay Hut Among the Mountains" (1912); "Once" (1912) (American Edition only); "Christ in the Tirol" (1912); A Modern Lover (1934). The stories included in A Modern Lover are: A Modern Lover" (1909); "The Old Adam" (1911); "Her Turn" (1912); "Strike Pay" (1912); "The Witch a la Mode" -- of which two manuscripts and a corrected typescript (Roberts E438) exist which indicate a