SOURCE: Smith, Duane. “England, My England as Fragmentary Novel.” The D. H. Lawrence Review 24, no. 3 (fall 1992): 247-55.

In the following essay, Smith argues that the stories comprising England, My England, and Other Stories possess a thematic unity and that the volume should be read as a fragmentary novel.

Writing about James Joyce's Dubliners, Frank O'Connor observes that “A good book of stories like a good book of poems is a thing in itself, the summing up of a writer's experience at a given time, and it suffers from being broken up or crowded in with other books.” O'Connor argues that books such as Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, D. H. Lawrence's England, My England [England, My England, and Other Stories], and Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time “should be read by themselves, as unities, and preferably in editions that resemble the originals” (113). Generally, although individual stories from Dubliners, Winesburg, and...