The Prussian Officer

by D H Lawrence

Published 1 December 1982
The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (1914) was Lawrence's first collection of stories, and it includes some of his finest and most distinctive fiction. The collection forms a bridge between his apprenticeship in realism, which culminatied in Sons and Lovers , and the visionary language and historical sweep of The Rainbow . Lawrence's arrangement of the stories, restored for the first time in this edition, also offers his diagnosis of the development of British society and its literature between 1870 and the outbreak of the First World War. Widely praised stories like `Odour of Chrysanthemums', `Daughters of the Vicar', and `The Prussian Officer' show people moving from a communal world, in which they battle against poverty, class prejudice, and natural disaster, to a more independent existence, full of potential for both self-fulfilment and self-destruction. These short stories celebrate the vitality that is fundamental in Lawrence's vision of life, and demonstrate the diversity of interests, narrative power, and vivid sense of place and character that distinguish the works of an acknowledged master in the genre.
This book is intended for students of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century British literature from sixth form upwards, but mostly 2nd/3rd-year undergraduates.

You Touched Me

by D H Lawrence

Published 1 February 1982
Two spinster sisters, quietly nursing their dying father in their family home, find their lives disrupted by the reappearance of a former charity boy, now a young soldier, whom their father had raised as a son.

The Rocking Horse Winner

by D H Lawrence

Published 1 December 1966
A boy growing up in a household where there is no love and no luck but always a shortage of money develops an uncanny ability to pick horse-race winners while furiously riding his wooden rocking-horse.