The Virgin And The Gypsy

The Virgin and the Gypsy is a short story by English author D. H. Lawrence, about personal and sexual liberation. It was written in 1926 and published posthumously in 1930. The Virgin and the Gypsy has become a classic and is one of Lawrence’s most vibrant short novels.

Deborah Epstein Nord traces the nearly ubiquitous British preoccupation with Gypsies in imaginative works by John Clare, Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, George Eliot, Arthur Conan Doyle, and D. H. Lawrence. She also exhumes lesser-known literary, ethnographic, and historical texts, exploring the fascinating histories of the nomadic writer George Borrow, the Gypsy Lore Society, Dora Yates, and other rarely examined figures and institutions. These textual representations are characterized by a tension between Gypsies as an alien, often despised "race" and the psychic or aesthetic desire to dissolve the boundary between English and Gypsy worlds. Nord suggests that, by the beginning of the twentieth century, romantic identification with Gypsies hardened into caricature and served to obscure the realities of Gypsy life and history. This phenomenon is reflected most famously in The Virgin and the Gipsy, in which D. H. Lawrence both exploits and criticizes the myth of Gypsies' unfettered sensuality, closeness to nature, and opposition to the oppressive strictures of modern life.

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The Virgin and the Gipsy was discovered in France after D. H. Lawrence's death in 1930. Immediately recognized as a masterpiece in which Lawrence had distilled and purified his ideas about sexuality and morality, The Virgin and the Gipsy has become a classic and is one of Lawrence's most electrifying short novels. Set in a small village in the English countryside, this is the story of a secluded, sensitive rector's daughter who yearns for meaning beyond the life to which she seems doomed. When she meets a handsome young gipsy whose life appears different from hers in every way, she is immediately smitten and yet still paralyzed by her own fear and social convention. Not until a natural catastrophe suddenly, miraculously sweeps away the world as she knew it does a new world of passion open for her. Lawrence's spirit is infused by all his tenderness, passion, and knowledge of the human soul.

From #1 international bestselling author Ami McKay comes The Virgin Cure, the story of a young girl abandoned and forced to fend for herself in the poverty and treachery of post-Civil War New York City. McKay, whose debut novel The Birth House made headlines around the world, returns with a resonant tale inspired by her own great-great-grandmother’s experiences as a pioneer of women’s medicine in nineteenth-century New York. One summer night in Lower Manhattan in 1871, twelve-year-old Moth is pulled from her bed and sold as a servant to a finely dressed woman. Knowing that her mother is so close while she is locked away in servitude, Moth bides her time until she can escape, only to find her old home deserted and her mother gone without a trace. Moth must struggle to survive alone in the murky world of the Bowery, a wild and lawless enclave filled with thieves, beggars, sideshow freaks, and prostitutes. She eventually meets Miss Everett, the proprietress of an "Infant School," a brothel that caters to gentlemen who pay dearly for "willing and clean" companions—desirable young virgins like Moth. She also finds friendship with Dr. Sadie, a female physician struggling against the powerful forces of injustice. The doctor hopes to protect Moth from falling prey to a terrible myth known as the "virgin cure"—the tragic belief that deflowering a "fresh maid" can cleanse the blood and heal men afflicted with syphilis—which has destroyed the lives of other Bowery girls. Ignored by society and unprotected by the law, Moth dreams of independence. But there's a high price to pay for freedom, and no one knows that better than a girl from Chrystie Street. In a powerful novel that recalls the evocative fiction Anita Shreve, Annie Proulx, and Joanne Harris, Ami McKay brings to light the story of early, forward-thinking social warriors, creating a narrative that readers will find inspiring, poignant, adventure-filled, and utterly unforgettable.

A Cambridge edition of Lawrence's best-known late fictions, The Virgin and the Gipsy and The Escaped Cock.

From “the master of the international thriller” (The New York Times) and the bestselling author of Tatiana and Gorky Park, Martin Cruz Smith’s first mystery novel—a classic crime whodunit with a shocking twist. One girl was dead, one girl was threatened, one girl was possessed. One girl was found horribly mutilated, the victim of a rite that no sane person believed could take place in the modern world. One girl lay trembling in her apartment, as the strange intruders forced open her bedroom door, and the waking nightmare began. And one girl discovered that her body and her soul were no longer her own.... A murder threatens to force the police into a confrontation with New York’s gypsy community. The cops are determined to pin the blame on a gypsy. But antique dealer Roman Grey knows there is more to the case than the convenient closing of a crime file, and he vows to bring the truly guilty to justice. You’ll never guess the secret of Gypsy in Amber.

At the age of twelve, Jan Yoors ran away from his cultural Belgian family to join a wandering band, a kumpania, of Gypsies. For ten years, he lived as one of them, traveled with them from country to country, shared both their pleasures and their hardshipsand came to know them as no one, no outsider, ever has. Here, in this firsthand and highly personal account of an extraordinary people, Yoors tells the real story of the Gypsies fascinating customs and their never-ending struggle to survive as free nomads in a hostile world. He vividly describes the texture of their daily life: the Gypsies as lovers, spouses, parents, healers, and mourners; their loyalties and enmities; their moral and ethical beliefs and practices; their language and culture; and the history and traditions behind their fierce pride. The exultant celebrations, the daring frontier crossings, the yearly horse fairs, the convoluted business deals in which Gypsy shrewdness combined with all the apparatus of modern technology are all brought to life in this memorable portrait of the most romanticized, yet most maligned and least-known people on earth. An insiders story, The Gypsies lifts the veil of secrecy that for so long has enshrouded this race of strangers in our midst.

Although beautiful young Laetitia is a Princess, she and her family lead a life more befitting paupers. Despising them for the gypsy blood that runs in their veins, the Grand Duchess, their cruel Cousin Augustina, bullies and oppresses them just as she persecutes the Romany people and banishes them from Ovenstadt's Capital. If only Laetitia could call upon some ancient gypsy spell to make things right. Worse still, Laetitia hears that the hateful woman has arranged for her daughter, Princess Stephanie, to marry King Viktor of Zvotana, despite her love for Laetitia's handsome brother Kyril. Determined to save Stephanie from a loveless marriage, Laetitia enlists the help of a Romany Voivode and his powerful gypsy magic and then meets the King disguised as a gypsy princess - only to find herself enraptured by the Voivode's spell and filled with a love too powerful to be denied -

A provocative social history examines the history of virginity and of noted virgins in Western culture, describing the unique fascination civilization has had for virginity from a social, political, economic, philosophical, medical, and legal standpoint. Reprint.