Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd: A Drama in Three Acts

The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd, written immediately after Sons and Lovers, is one of D. H. Lawrence’s most significant early works. The play, Lawrence’s first, is the alter ego of the story “Odour of Chrysanthemums” and, like the short story, deals with a catastrophe in the lives of a coal mining family. Drawing upon the intensity of events that unfold in the miner’s kitchen, the play explores a marriage bowed under the weight of a husband’s drinking and infidelity and peers into the strange, burgeoning relationship between the neglected wife, Mrs. Holroyd, and the young electrician in whom she seeks emotional refuge. First published in 1914, The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd is a bare tracing of the ways in which a marriage has gone wrong.