The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd
The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd: A Drama in Three Acts
D. H. LAWRENCE
Foreword by John Worthen
Series: Pine Street Books
Copyright Date: 2002
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press,
Pages: 112
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt15sk826
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Book Info
The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd
Book Description:

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, burgeoning relationship between the neglected wife, Mrs. Holroyd, and the young electrician in whom she seeks emotional refuge. First published in 1914, TheWidowing of Mrs. Holroydis a bare tracing of the ways in which a marriage has gone wrong.

eISBN: 978-0-8122-9262-6
Subjects: Language & Literature
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-iv)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. v-vi)
  3. FOREWORD
    FOREWORD (pp. vii-xii)
    John Worthen

    D. H. Lawrence’s playThe Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd, representing work he had done at various times between 1910 and 1913, is one of his most significant early works. He began it as an unknown and almost unpublished writer in London, influenced by the suggestion of Ford Madox Hueffer that he should concentrate on the lives of the working class he knew so well (Lawrence had been born in Eastwood in Nottinghamshire; his father was a miner at Brinsley colliery, about a mile to the north). Lawrence completed a draft of the play in 1910, but could do nothing with...

  4. INTRODUCTION
    INTRODUCTION (pp. xiii-xvi)
    Edwin Björkman

    D. H. Lawrence is one of the most significant of the new generation of writers just beginning to appear in England. One of their chief marks is that they seem to step forward full-grown, without a history to account for their maturity. Another characteristic is that they frequently spring from social layers which in the past had to remain largely voiceless. And finally, they have all in their blood what their elders had to acquire painfully: that is, an evolutionary conception of life.

    Three years ago the author of “The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd” was wholly unknown, having not yet...

  5. The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd
    • THE FIRST ACT
      THE FIRST ACT (pp. 3-35)

      The kitchen of a miner’s small cottage. On the left is the fireplace, with a deep, full red fire. At the back is a white-curtained window, and beside it the outer door of the room. On the right, two white wooden stairs intrude into the kitchen below the closed stairfoot door. On the left, another door.

      The room is furnished with a chintz-backed sofa under the window, a glass-knobbed painted dresser on the right, and in the centre, toward the fire, a table with a red and blue check tablecloth. On one side of the hearth is a wooden rocking-chair,...

    • THE SECOND ACT
      THE SECOND ACT (pp. 36-61)

      The scene is the same, two hours later. The cottage is in darkness, save for the firelight. On the table is spread a newspaper. A cup and saucer, a plate, a piece of bacon in the frying tin are on the newspaper ready for the miner’s breakfast. Mrs. Holroyd has gone to bed. There is a noise of heavy stumbling down the three steps outside.

      BLACKMORE’S VOICE

      Steady, now, steady. It’s all in darkness. Missis!

      — Has she gone to bed?

      [He tries the latch — shakes the door.

      Holroyd’s voice (he is drunk)

      Her’s locked me out. Let me...

    • THE THIRD ACT
      THE THIRD ACT (pp. 62-93)

      Scene, the same. Time, the following evening, about seven o’clock. The table is half laid, with a large cup and saucer, plate, etc., ready for Holroyd’s dinner, which, like all miners, he has when he comes home between four and five o’clock. On the other half of the table Mrs. Holroyd is ironing. On the hearth stands newly baked loaves of bread. The irons hang at the fire.

      Jack, with a bowler hat hanging at the back of his head, parades up to the sofa, on which stands Minnie engaged in dusting a picture. She has a soiled white apron...