This selection of 25 of D. H. Lawrence’s stories has been chosen to show the wide range of Lawrence’s work in this genre at its best.
This selection of short stories has been made not only to offer a representative and wide-ranging selection of D. H. Lawrence's shorter fiction but also to trace a pattern of development in the author's career. As Brian Finney writes in the Introduction: "To follow the development of his stories from the gauche anecdotes of his early twenties to the sophisticated parodies of the genre that he wrote in the last years of his life is like retracing the history of the genre from its pre-Chekhovian social realism and watching it reach forward to the verbal play and self-conscious artificiality of postmodernist writers such as Borges and Beckett."
This selection of D. H. Lawrence’s stories illustrates the range and development of his shorter fiction during his brief lifetime. Brief details of their dates of composition and publication are given in the Notes. Brian Finney’s Introduction offers a comprehensive outline of Lawrence’s development as a writer of shorter fiction from naturalistic beginnings to the symbolic and mythic near the end of his life. His later stories, Finney writes, “reach new heights of inventiveness, experimenting with genres like myth, the fairy story and satiric comedy, or . . . the ghost story and the murder story, only to . . . reverse the reader’s normal expectations.”