SOURCE: Michelucci, Stefania. “The Pact with the Genius Loci: The Prussian Officer.” In Space and Place in the Works of D. H. Lawrence, translated by Jill Franks, pp. 18-23. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2002.

In the following essay, Michelucci traces Lawrence's development as a short story writer through an analysis of the pieces in The Prussian Officer, and Other Stories and contrasts the differences between these stories and his novel The White Peacock.

The frontiers are not east or west, north or south,                                                   but whenever a man fronts a fact. … 

—Henry David Thoreau

The stories in The Prussian Officer [The Prussian Officer, and Other Stories] surround, so to speak, Lawrence's two earliest novels, being written in a wide span of time (1907-14) which begins with The White Peacock and ends after Sons and Lovers. The stories, even more than the novels, constitute valuable evidence of the artistic...