The Princess and other stories [antikvár]

Introduction This volume and its companion The Mortal Coil and Other Stories complete the publication of Lawrence's shorter fiction in Penguin. These twelve stories all date from the last eight years of Lawrence's life. On ii September 1922 the Lawrences arrived at Taos, New Mexico, as guests of Mabel Dodge Luhan. Three days later her husband Tony, a Taos Indian, took Lawrence motoring in the Apache country for five days. On the evening of his return Lawrence asked Mabel if she would like to work on a book with him:' He said he wanted to write an American novel that would express the life, the spirit, of America and he wanted to write it around me - my life from the time I left New York to come out to New Mexico.' Two days later Lawrence sent a note to Mabel: 'I have done your "train" episode and brought you to Lamy at 3 in the morning.' This is possibly the first imaginative writing Lawrence attempted in the new continent, and the style is quite different from anything he had written before, sardonic in tone, with something of the timeless-ness and hard-edged, spiky character of the landscape. It is a superb opening for a novel, or, better still, a novella like 'The Woman Who Rode Away' (a story more freely based on Mabel Luhan who called it 'that story where Lorenzo thought he finished me up'). Yet it seems Lawrence wrote no more, partly, according to Mabel, because of Frieda's opposition to the close collaboration which would have been involved. In December the Lawrences moved out to a large ranch, the Del Monte, seventeen miles away in the mountains: I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had. It certainly changed me for ever. In the magnificent fierce morning of New Mexico one sprang awake, a new part of the soul woke up suddenly and the old world gave way to a new. All those mornings when I went with a hoe along the ditch to the Canon, at the ranch, and stood, in the fierce, proud silence of the Rockies, on their foothills, to look far over the desert to the blue mountains away in Arizona, blue as chalcedony, with the sage-brush desert sweeping grey-blue in between, dotted with tiny cube-crystals of houses, the vast amphitheatre of lofty, indomitable desert, sweeping round to the ponderous 7