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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.912
EAN: 9780679740773
ISBN: 0679740775
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 160
Publication Date: 1992-06-02
Publisher: Vintage
Product Release Date: 1992-06-02
Studio: Vintage

The Virgin and the Gipsy was discovered in France after D. H. Lawrence's death in 1930. Immediately recognized as a masterpiece in which Lawrence had distilled and purified his ideas about sexuality and morality, The Virgin and the Gipsy has become a classic and is one of Lawrence's most electrifying short novels.

Set in a small village in the English countryside, this is the story of a secluded, sensitive rector's daughter who yearns for meaning beyond the life to which she seems doomed. When she meets a handsome young gipsy whose life appears different from hers in every way, she is immediately smitten and yet still paralyzed by her own fear and social convention. Not until a natural catastrophe suddenly, miraculously sweeps away the world as she knew it does a new world of passion open for her. Lawrence's spirit is infused by all his tenderness, passion, and knowledge of the human soul.

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Youth and 'meaning'
Review: Two sisters, Yvette and Lucille, have just emerged from the constraints of youth into the freedom of young adulthood, but Yvette finds to her surprise that life is dull and meaningless rather than full of portent. Their father is a Church of England curate and their household is full of what seems to be false morality. The girls' granny dominates the household, even their father, with her psychological plotting and manipulation. Then, by chance, Yvette meets the gypsies, who seem to have an earthy passion and grip on life. Gradually Yvette becomes entangled in a crush on the gypsies and in particular on one black haired, wolfish man.

What is most interesting about this book is that the main character, Yvette, is naive and even flighty and thus much of her own thoughts, deductions and philosophies cannot be trusted. In order to understand Lawrence's true intentions the reader must follow the nature imagery he has embedded in the story. The novel is also well plotted, containing a number of surprising twists and turns that keep the reader interested. It is often said that this book is a precursor of Lawrence's last novel Lady Chatterley's Lover. Certainly both books are about higher-class women having relationships with very low-class men, and certainly both these women feel the emptiness of their class' values and the hypocrisy of societies morals, but that is where the comparison basically ends. Yvette is a very different person from Lady Chatterley, the course of the relationships is different, and to my mind Lawrence has very different opinions about the appropriateness of the two relationships.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Distilled Lawrence
Review: The Virgin and the Gipsy, told in the language of a vivid, pared-down parable, though short, seems somehow an essential addition to Lawrence's canon.

The story of a younger sister simmering with rebellion against the stifling morality of a rectory, society's expectations, and a vampiric mother figure, it seems to incorporate themes of Lady Chatterley, Sons & Lovers and Women in Love in a potent distillation of Lawrence's obsessions. It's like a voluptuous poem that affirms and fortifies his earlier work.

This is a great book for those who find some of the more well-known novels "baggy" or "loose." Direct and unadorned, the language nonetheless probes the protagonist's inner life with Lawrence's characteristic poetic incisiveness. The language catches us at the elemental level of a fairy tale, and in places, the vividness is almost startling.

Lawrence can be eyebrow-raising in his directness: not even about sex, but about human beings, their true hidden feelings and motivations. Highly recommended.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Longing For Love
Review: In this book, Lawrence is in usual top form in describing the longing of a young girl, a virgin, for the slightly unconventional. Her vision of her future being a stayed and commonplace marriage to one of the local boys of character and money, she longs for something else before that fate befalls her. She does find that love, very much by accident.

She comes across a Gypsy and she falls deeply and viscerally in love with him. Yet, she is coy and she is proper about it. Although she badly wishes to be with him, she understands the potential scandal of such a union. Her father being one that is a non-believer, despite his position as the rector; she sees his revulsion for those things of the body. The rector's wife had left him for an impoverished boy. She sought something the rector just could not provide to her. Even though she was his everything, he was not able to make her feel the love she wished deeply even to her bones.

Her daughter too felt that there was more than just the future she envisioned. She felt that it was not a matter that could be ignored. It was a matter that had to be satisfied and soon. But how to do so, without being seen as a prostitute by her own family; that was the mystery and the beauty of the book.

Finally, amongst a great flood and terror that is more frightful than can be imagined, she finds herself with the Gypsy in her own bedroom, safe from the outside world of people because of the isolation and protection afforded by an unanticipated flood. Here she makes the passionate love to him that she had heretofore only dreamed about. Here she becomes a woman, and becomes a lover at the same time.

As always, Lawrence fills the text with serious metaphor and memory. He uses symbolism, systematically revealing the undercurrents of his character's huge love and anticipation with thinly veiled double entendres and images. This book is specifically recommended for Lawrence readers, but in addition, the book is highly recommended to those seeking love and those fulfilled in love.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: A Deep Exploration of Female Feelings
Review: Though it is a quite short story, the Virgin and the Gipsy, tells a lot about the feelings and thoughts of a lot of young women from all over the world. Yvette is a beautiful 19 year old virgin, still discovering a lot about life and sexuality. She stumbles upon this gipsy who eventually helps her settle down her turmoil of emotional confusions. Yvette has felt as a prisoner all her life. A prisoner living in a house which is supposedly occupied by her family, whereas in fact they were her enemies. A prisoner of convention and narrow defintions of important things as love and sex. And a prisoner of her own past, where she has always struggled to jusitfy her mother's escape for the sake of love. The looks of the gipsy transfer to her liberty, more precisely; sexual liberty and understanding. Although it takes her sometime to discover that, her discovery is sure at the end and at last she becomes capable of declaring that she knows what love is.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Unfinished fairy tale for adults
Review: The Virgin and the Gipsy by D. H. Lawrence. Recommended.

Discovered in France after D. H. Lawrence's death and never finalized by the author, The Virgin and the Gipsy is the fairy tale-like story of Yvette Saywell, a 19-year-old rector's daughter chafing against the moral "life unbelievers" that make up her family.

Although the "virgin" of the title, Yvette is no demure maiden. She is temperamental, strong willed, and aware of her father's "degrading unbelief, the worm which was his heart's core"-just as her fallen mother was. She enjoys being contrary and openly contemptuous of her middle-class, overtly moral, covertly disturbed family. Her every exposure to life leaves her harder; "She lost her illusions in the collapse of her sympathies." She loathes the rectory "with a loathing that consumed her life."

The most hated person in the Saywell family is the rector's ancient, blind mother, called "The Mater" or "Granny." Yvette hates her. Her sister Lucille hates her. Their aunt Cissie hates her. She is compared to a toad, a reptile, a fungus. Like the toad that snaps its jaws on all the bees exiting the hive and devouring all life around it, The Mater, who gave literal life to the family, absorbs the entire family's energy and life force. The gardener smashes the toad with a stone in oblique foreshadowing of The Mater's fate.

Yvette is keenly aware of her status as a "moral unbeliever" (like her mother, who ran off with young man when Lucille and Yvette were children) and her virgin power. When she finds herself in the company of a virile gipsy man and his "lonely, predative glance," she finds herself in his virile power, "gone in his will."

The gipsy represents her "free-born will," which separates her from the rest of the Saywells. He is an outsider, "on an old, old war-path against such as herself . . . Yes, if she belonged to any side, and to any clan, it was to his." Under the influence of the absent mother, an adulterous couple she encounters, and the defiant gipsy who "endures in opposition," Yvette is forced into a confrontation with her sneering father-a confrontation that brings out his hidden evil and self-righteousness.

The Virgin and the Gipsy is an odd novel, much of it written in the style of an adult fairy tale. "The Mater could be a variation of "The Wicked Queen," while "She-who-was-Cynthia," the "white snowflower" of a myth or tale, blooming in perpetuity, could be the prodigal Princess whose transformation into a degraded nettle threatens the self-satisfied and lethal stability of the Saywells. The deluge that puts an end to this uncomfortable status quo is at first mysterious in origin, purging the world as it does on a clear, sunny, rainless day. The gipsy could be the Prince or the traveler, come from afar and finally fulfilling his role in the tale as rescuer-literally and figuratively.

Lawrence was known for rewriting and editing many times over, and clearly The Virgin and Gipsy lacks his revision. Yet its themes of female sexuality, male power over it, the immorality of conventional morality, and the sacredness of vitality that are explored in depth in Lady Chatterley's Lover and Women in Love, are here presented in a beautifully distilled form-perhaps more haunting for its very simplicity.

Diane L. Schirf, 18 August 2003.

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