Enter Ciccio, the surly dark-eyed horseman. Into this drab environment enter the Natcha-Kee-Tawara: a polyglot, poly-amorous troupe of travelling players united, on- and off-stage, in a fantasy of Native American nomadism. Losing first her mother, a perpetual invalid, and later her cross-dressing father, a woefully ineffectual small-scale entrepreneur, Alvina feels doomed to merge with the tribe of eternal spinsters who surround her in the dreary mining community of Woodhouse. Fleeing with him to Naples, she leaves her safe world behind and enters one of sexual awakening, desire, and fleeting freedom. Alvina Houghton's plight, however, is given a rather comic and even picaresque treatment. In this most under-valued of his novels, Lawrence once again presents us with a young woman hemmed in by her middle-class upbringing and (like Ursula Brangwen in The Rainbow) longing for escape.
She was cut off from everything she belonged to." Lawrences forgotten novel, is a passionate tale of longing and sexual defiance, of devastation and destitution.
"There is no mistake about it, Alvina was a lost girl.
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