D. H. Lawrence: The Vicar’s Garden and Other Stories. Ed. N. H. Reeve (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xxxvii + 265. Cloth € 95.00.

This is another volume re-printing or printing for the first time early versions of texts already included in their ‘final’ form in earlier volumes of the Cambridge Edition. It was, according to the editor, “conceived and planned by John Worthen, who gave it its title, collected much of the material, and drafted an introduction”. Collected are some of Lawrence’s earliest surviving attempts at story-writing, two of them, at least, produced for the Nottinghamshire Guardian competition in 1907, offering prizes for ‘the best story of the most enjoyable Christmas’ and ‘the best Legend of Some Historic Building…’ within the surrounding counties. ‘The Vicar’s Garden’ (1907) and ‘The Shadow in the Rose Garden’ (1914), ‘A Page from the Annals of Gresleia’ (1907) and ‘Ruby-Glass (1907) as well as ‘The White Stocking’ (1907 and 1914) are early versions of stories subsequently revised and included in The Prussian Officer and other Stories, published in November 1914. ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’, also included in that volume, has survived in several different versions, two of them (1910 and 1911) printed here (a different version of the ending from July 1914 is reproduced in an appendix).

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