“Second Best” is a story written by David Herbert Lawrence and published in 1914. This story is about two sisters Frances and Anne, who are twenty-three and fourteen years old. They live together and share with each other their feelings and emotions. Frances tells Anne her previous unhappy love story, and Anne tells her feelings belonging to one boy. These dialogues are short, but they are full of hidden sense.
The whole story itself has many elements which call attention to deeper meanings. It occupies such topics as love, choice, life in general, sisters’ relations. It reveals how love affects human’s soul and how we by ourselves can make our life better. “Second Best” is the title of the story because Frances in the end chooses the second-best variant of man Tom. It is interesting, that during the whole story until the end we can’t figure out why is it called so.
While reading “Second Best” we notice wide and wonderful description of nature and surroundings of characters. We can fully imagine where they are now and what they see. Also author is a master in depicting people’s emotions. In dialogues a reader can pretend like he is watching a film, because all moves of the body, all changes on the face are described perfectly.
There is the third-person narration in the story; however, it doesn’t prohibit the author to express a huge specter of emotions and feelings of the personages. The author skillfully tells about every person and gives a very detailed description of their minds. But there is not any separation into bad and good characters, everyone in the book has his own advantages and disadvantages, so reader can make a unique image of every personage and decide who is likable and who is repulsive. It may seem that “Second Best” is just another story about love, but the literary manner of the author makes it more unusual, original and worth reading.
