The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd: A Drama in Three Acts

By D. H. Lawrence, Edwin Bjorkman and John Worthen

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, The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd is a bare tracing of the ways in which a marriage has gone wrong.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 29, 2015
• ISBN: 9780812292626

D. H. Lawrence

David Herbert (D. H.) Lawrence was a prolific English novelist, essayist, poet, playwright, literary critic and painter. His most notable works include Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Rainbow, Sons and Lovers and Women in Love.

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THE WIDOWING OF MRS. HOLROYD

THE WIDOWING OF

MRS. HOLROYD

A DRAMA IN THREE ACTS

D. H. LAWRENCE

Foreword by John Worthen

Originally published 1914 by Mitchell Kennerley

Foreword copyright © 2002 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved

First Pine Street Books paperback edition published 2002

Printed on acid-free paper

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Pine Street Books is an imprint of

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert), 1885–1930

The widowing of Mrs. Holroyd : a drama in three acts /

D. H. Lawrence ; foreword by John Worthen.

    p.   cm. (1st Pine Street Books pbk. ed.)

ISBN 0-8122-1817-5 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Coal miners—Drama. 2. Coal miners—Family relationships—

Drama. 3. Coal mines and mining—Accidents—Drama. I. Title.

II. Worthen, John

PR6023.A93 W5   2002

CONTENTS

FOREWORD   John Worthen

INTRODUCTION   Edwin Björkman

THE WIDOWING OF MRS. HOLROYD

FOREWORD

John Worthen

D. H. Lawrence’s play The 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 it in spite of the support of his friend and adviser Edward Garnett, reader for the firm of Duckworth (who would eventually publish the play in England). Not until 1913 did Garnett get the play accepted by the American publisher Mitchell Kennerley, and by then Lawrence not only had published Sons and Lovers but was at work on the first drafts of the Sisters novel that became both The Rainbow and Women in Love. It was in 1914, at the height of his early success as a published author, that his play would be published in America and England.¹

The play and its alter ego, the story Odour of Chrysanthemums, both center on a catastrophe in the lives of a mining family. The disaster was based on what had actually happened, five years before Lawrence was born, in his father’s family. Lawrence’s father Arthur and all three of his uncles (James, George, and Walter) at various times worked at Brinsley colliery, Brinsley being the Lawrence family center where the aunts, uncles, and grandparents lived. Uncle James—married to Polly Renshaw, and with two children—was in 1880 living in a tiny cottage just up the line from the railway-crossing,² just by the colliery; a hundred yards further down the railway line lay the house of his parents (Quarry Cottage) and fifty yards further the pub the Prince of Wales, conveniently placed to attract miners as they walked past on their way home from work. What happened to James was almost exactly what happens to Bates in the story and Holroyd in the play: a fall of rock and coal trapped him and he was suffocated. Lawrence never forgot hearing (at the age of seven) his grandmother Louisa Lawrence say, Like a blessed smiling babe he looked—he did that.³ Louisa—like the Grandmother in the play—had been called in to be with her daughter-in-law, had witnessed the return of her dead son, and had helped to lay him out.

Garnett was apparently not happy with the title The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd; like Lawrence, he may well have been conscious of the close parallel with Harley Granville-Barker’s 1907 play The Marrying of Ann Leete. Lawrence had suggested After-damp as a title on the manuscript: It would do exceedingly well, in idea, but I don’t like the word. He said he preferred Schlagender Wetter, which he had perhaps been told was the German for after-damp.⁴ There is some minor confusion here; the German (properly schlagende Wetter) is actually an extraordinarily expressive phrase for fire-damp, the dangerous explosive mixture of methane gas and air endemic in coal mines. After-damp is formed (as its name suggests) after the explosion of firedamp, but after-damp is also a common term for the horribly expressive choke-damp, and this seems to be the mixture Lawrence was really thinking of: something that occurs naturally, as well as after an explosion:

A miner’s term for the carbonic acid gas . . . which accumulates in old workings in coal-pits . . . after an explosion in a coal-mine, it often rises and mingling with the remaining nitrogen, steam, smoke and dust, constitutes the after-damp.⁵

In the play, after-damp is mentioned in passing as a possible reason for Holroyd’s suffocation. But the real subject of the play is the poisonous atmosphere of the Holroyd marriage and the ways the partners have stifled each other. The immediate provocation for the final catastrophe may be the way Lizzie Holroyd has allowed herself to gravitate to Blackmore (a love interest that does not occur in Odour of Chrysanthemums): there is certainly a major marital explosion at the end of Act II. But the love interest turns out, in the end, to be almost irrelevant. Are Blackmore’s plans for the family’s escape from situation, marriage, and community any more than a fantasy? What on earth would Lizzie Holroyd and her children do in Spain? The love Lizzie expresses for Blackmore at the end of Act II is a consequence of her feelings of stifled, frustrated rage and a response to his urgent demands, but, although Blackmore may be sincere, there is something more than a little disturbing about his loving care for almost everyone around him: Holroyd, Lizzie, the children. It is as if he has to live through others, having insufficient life of his own.

And the unstable, poisonous Holroyd marriage ends not with an elopement into

Reviews for The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd

[petra5xs · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Dank, dark, Northern angst set among miners. Lawrence's speciality. Mrs. Holroyd didn't marry for love and didn't find it in her marriage with the husband who humiliated her for his own amusement and beat her because she was his slave. But dawning happiness with another and the sudden fulfilment of wishing her brutish, brutal husband dead brought out the guilt in her. Years of ill-treatment fell away as she washed his corpse and all she could do was sob out her regrets and eulogise the dead.

Silly cow.