D. H. Lawrence: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn
1885 to 1930
Quick answer: D. H. Lawrence craft file: the body as revelation, the repeating sentence, "Odour of Chrysanthemums", "The Rocking-Horse Winner", and what his stories teach.
Quick facts
- Born: 1885, Eastwood, Nottinghamshire
- Died: 1930, Vence, France, aged 44
- Wrote in: English
- Known for: "Odour of Chrysanthemums", "The Rocking-Horse Winner", "The Horse Dealer's Daughter"
- Signature move: A physical act, washing a body or touching a face, that tells a character the truth
- Start with: "Odour of Chrysanthemums" (1911)
Lawrence is remembered for the novels and the trials, but the stories are where his method is cleanest, because they are too short for the preaching. The best stories keep the physical facts of the miner's kitchen he grew up in: the pit smell, the wet coat, the body on a stretcher. His people discover what they feel through what their bodies do, and the sentences repeat and circle the way feeling does.
What he actually does on the page
He lets a physical task deliver the story's knowledge. "Odour of Chrysanthemums" (1911) has Elizabeth Bates waiting with her children for a husband who is late from the pit and probably drinking. He is brought home dead, suffocated in a fall, and she and his mother wash the body on the parlour floor. In the washing she understands that she never knew him, that they had been strangers in the dark for years, and the recognition comes through her hands on his skin rather than through any thought she could have had at the table.
He repeats a phrase until it becomes a force. In "The Rocking-Horse Winner" (1926) the house whispers, in a phrase the children hear in the walls, that there must be more money. The boy Paul rides his rocking horse to a frenzy to learn the winners, wins his mother thousands, and the whisper only grows louder. He dies of the effort on the night of the Derby. The repetition is the plot's engine and its moral at once.
He stages the turn as touch. In "The Blind Man" (1920) the blinded Maurice asks his wife's visitor, the clever lawyer Bertie, to touch his scarred face, and lays his own hands on Bertie's head; Maurice is exalted and Bertie is destroyed. In "The Horse Dealer's Daughter" (1922) a doctor pulls a woman from a pond and finds that the rescue has become something neither of them chose. Lawrence's characters learn with their skin.
The signature move
The revelation through the body is dissected best in the last pages of "Odour of Chrysanthemums". Lawrence slows the washing scene to the pace of the task itself: the two women, the bowl, the towel, the weight of the dead man. Elizabeth's mind moves in short, repeated sentences that keep returning to the same fact and finding it larger each time, that he was a separate being, that she had denied him, that death has restored the truth between them. The mother-in-law weeps and talks; Elizabeth does not. Then the ordinary world returns with the need to tidy the room before the children wake. A story writer can learn here that the largest realisation in a story should arrive during the most physical work, and that the work should keep going after it.
Stories to read first
Seven stories, from 1911 to 1926.
What to steal for your own stories
Exercises drawn from the stories.
What not to copy
The sermon. Lawrence at his worst tells you what blood and instinct mean, and the essays leak into the fiction; the stories from the mid-1920s in particular carry views on women, race and power that are indefensible, with "The Woman Who Rode Away" the clearest case. Take the body's knowledge and the physical scene; leave the doctrine and half the repeats.
Life at a glance
- 1885: Born in a mining town in Nottinghamshire, the son of a collier
- 1911: "Odour of Chrysanthemums" in the English Review; his first novel, The White Peacock
- 1912: Leaves England with Frieda Weekley, the wife of his former professor
- 1913: Sons and Lovers
- 1914: The Prussian Officer and Other Stories
- 1922: England, My England and Other Stories, with "The Horse Dealer's Daughter"
- 1926: "The Rocking-Horse Winner"
- 1930: Dies of tuberculosis in the south of France
What writers can take from this
- Let hands, not thoughts, deliver the turn.
- Repeat a phrase with a purpose and stop when the purpose is served.
- Keep the chore going after the revelation.
- Write the mining town or the farm you actually know; Lawrence's are exact because they were his.
- Cut the paragraph that explains what the body has already said.
Try it yourself
Two people who have never liked each other must do a slow, physical task together for one hour (clearing a dead relative's room, digging out a car, bathing a patient). Write it in under 1,000 words. One of them realises something about the other during the work. No one may say it. The task must continue past the realisation to the end.
Questions
What is D. H. Lawrence's best short story?
"Odour of Chrysanthemums" (1911) is the one critics most often rank first. "The Rocking-Horse Winner" (1926) is the most anthologised, and "The Horse Dealer's Daughter" (1922) is the most taught.
How did D. H. Lawrence influence the short story?
He brought the working-class body into serious English fiction and showed that a story's turn could be carried by physical contact rather than dialogue or thought. His rhythmic, repeating prose influenced a generation of English and American writers about the body and about class.
Is D. H. Lawrence hard to read?
The stories are clear and dramatic and much easier than the novels. The Nottinghamshire dialect in some of them is light, and "The Rocking-Horse Winner" reads like a fable.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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