The Woman Who Rode Away

The Woman Who Rode Away - David Herbert Lawrence - "The Woman who Rode Away" is a short story by D. H. Lawrence. It was written in New Mexico during the summer of 1924 and first published in The Dial in two installments in 1925. It later became the title story for a collection of Lawrence's shorter fictional works issued in 1978 by Martin Secker in the UK and Alfred A. Knopf in the US. The cave that features at the end of the story was inspired by a visit to a cave on Lucero Peak which overlooks the town of Arroyo Seco, New Mexico.



David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 - 2 March 1930) was an important and controversial English writer of the 20th century, whose prolific and diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism and personal letters. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, sexuality, and instinctive behaviour.



Lawrence's unsettling opinions earned him many enemies and he endured hardships, official persecution, censorship and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage." At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel. He is now generally valued as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature, although some feminists object to the attitudes toward women and sexuality found in his works.