Reading D.H. Lawrence's Short Stories Without Losing Your Patience
The Misfortunes Of Virtue And Other Early Tales Worlds Classics
I picked up a copy of this at a secondhand shop in Bristol about seven years ago. It was £1.50, slightly damp at the edges, and honestly I didn't know what I was getting into. The Lawrence scholarship world tends to treat his short fiction as a minor stepping stone between novels, which is lazy criticism. These stories are dense, awkward, and occasionally infuriating in ways that make them worth reading slowly. The collection contains early work, including the title story which reworks the Marquis de Sade's Justine through a modern English lens. Lawrence wasn't just copying the source material. He was wrestling with it, trying to extract something moral without resorting to the moralising he despised. That tension shows on every page. Here is how I approach these stories when I have time, and how you should too if you want to get anything useful out of them.
Start with the biographical context, then immediately forget it. Lawrence wrote many of these tales between 1911 and 1916, during the period when he was producing The Rainbow and facing obscenity prosecutions. The early stories carry the weight of that pressure. They are more experimental, sometimes clumsier, because he was still figuring out how to say what he wanted to say without getting censored into silence. Reading them with that awareness changes how you see the narrative choices. But don't let the biography become the entire point. The stories stand or fall on their own terms. Pay attention to the punctuation. This sounds absurd until you actually read Lawrence aloud, which I recommend doing at least once per story. His comma usage in these early works is erratic. Sometimes he uses commas like a proper grammarian. Sometimes he inserts them wherever his breath pauses. The Penguin World's Classics edition I use does not provide a critical apparatus explaining these choices, which is a genuine oversight. I learned to read his commas phonetically rather than grammatically, treating them as breath marks rather than syntactic boundary markers. It changed the rhythm of almost every story. One specific problem I ran into: in "A Propos of Sensuality and Intellect," the prose spirals into a kind of fever-dream catalogue of sensations, and the sentences keep running past the point where they should stop. I hit a wall reading it for weeks because I kept trying to parse the logic linearly. What I finally did was read the paragraph as a single breath unit, accepting that the accumulation of images was the argument itself. The point isn't deduced. It's assembled through sensory overload. That approach cut my reading time for that particular story from two hours down to about twenty minutes.
The de Sade connection matters more than most readers admit. Lawrence was famously fascinated and repelled by the Marquis. "The Misfortunes of Virtue" takes Justine's story and strips much of its philosophical scaffolding, leaving a more raw, almost documentary account of suffering. Lawrence seems to be asking whether virtue can survive without being performance. The original de Sade text is endlessly witty and brutally cynical. Lawrence's version is quieter and darker. Comparing the two side by side reveals more about Lawrence's own moral position than any critical essay I've read on the subject. A counter-intuitive point: several critics have argued that Lawrence's early tales fail because they are uneven in tone. I would argue the opposite. The tonal shifts are the whole point. Lawrence deliberately jars the reader between comedy and brutality, tenderness and disgust. This is not accidental amateurishness. It is a formal strategy that unsettles the reader's moral complacency. When a story about courtship suddenly pivots into something almost sadistic, the whiplash is designed. Accept it rather than wishing for smoother transitions. Common pitfall: Readers trained on the tightly plotted modern short story will find these tales meandering. They resist the expectation of a clean narrative arc. Several stories don't really have endings in any conventional sense. They simply stop, often mid-thought, as though Lawrence forgot to close the door. This is frustrating but also characteristic of his project. He was trying to capture thought in motion, not neatly packaged plots. If you go in expecting Chekhov-level closure, you will be disappointed every time.
Get the Full Details
The World's Classics paperback I reference runs about 200 pages and costs roughly £8.50 new, though used copies circulate for significantly less. The introduction, if your edition includes one, tends to be scholarly and dry. Read it after you have read through the stories at least once. Pre-reading the introduction primes you to look for the wrong things in the text. One more practical note about the edition itself. Some printings have errata in the later stories where line breaks appear mid-word or dialogue tags are misattributed. I once spent an hour trying to figure out why a character's motivation seemed completely incoherent, only to discover that the printer had dropped half a sentence between two paragraphs. Always check the bibliographic notes at the front of your copy to confirm which printing you are holding. It saves headaches. The stories I recommend starting with are "The White Peacock," the title story, and "A Propos of Sensuality and Intellect." The shorter pieces toward the end of the collection are weaker, though not useless. Lawrence was still developing his voice during this period, and you can hear the development happening in real time across the pages. That process of becoming is, honestly, more interesting than the polished work he would produce later.
Read slowly. Read aloud when a passage resists you. Don't force yourself through stories that aren't working and circle back later. These tales are not meant to be consumed quickly. They are meant to be sat with, interrogated, and occasionally set down in frustration before returning to them with a clearer head.
