The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price

An intense and powerful drama, set in a Nottinghamshire mining town.

Elizabeth Holroyd is an educated woman with refined sensibilities, struggling to make a good home for her two children in the grime and poverty of a Nottinghamshire mining town.

Poverty is not the only problem she faces. Her husband, a miner, is a brutish man, prone to fighting, drinking and spending his evenings in the pub. When Blackmore, a mine electrician, recognises Mrs Holroyd as a kindred spirit, he asks her to leave her husband for him, with the promise of a new life for her and her children in faraway Spain.

It's a promise that Mrs Holroyd is almost ready to accept...

D.H. Lawrence's second play, The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd was written in 1910 but went unpublished until 1914. It was staged for the first time in 1916, by the Players Producing Company at the Little Theatre in Los Angeles, USA. In 1920 it was staged in Britain, in an amateur production at the Garrick Theatre in Altrincham.

This edition, in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, includes an introduction by Colin Counsell, a glossary of difficult words, a chronology and suggestions for further reading.