The Virgin and the Gipsy / D. H. Lawrence

A marvellous writer. He forged his own language’ Claire Tomalin, Independent on Sunday Yvette, the temperamental daughter of a vicar, longs to be freed from the stifling confines of her respectable middle-class family. In her feverish search for love and freedom she meets a gipsy who awakens within her an elemental force that threatens the fabric of her existence. A forerunner to Lady Chatterley’s Lover, with its theme of love and desire across the classes, The Virgin and the Gipsy is a powerful evocation of the conflict between intuition and social convention. ‘Lawrence urged men and women to live, to honour the quick of themselves, to glory in the exhilarating terror of this brief life’ Frederic Raphael, Sunday Times