There was a woman who loved her husband, but she could not live with him. The husband, on his side, was sincerely attached to his wife, yet he could not live with her.
These are the opening lines to this story about marital strife and they are noteworthy as an example of form fitting content. The simple declarative statements of fact, exhaustive of any emotional attachment, reflect the condition of the state of the marriage and the understated wry commentary on the detachment further fulfills the purpose of the story’s larger exploration of marriage as a state of being.
An island, if it is big enough, is no better than a continent. It has to be really quite small, before it FEELS LIKE an island; and this story will show how tiny it has to be, before you can presume to fill it with your own personality.
Both the title and this assertion by the narration prove ironic by story’s end. This is a tale about a man in search of identity who works his way through several islands, each progressively smaller than the one before. By the conclusion, the titular man has fulfilled the presumption of filling up an island with own personality, but at a cruelly ironic price. Even though his last island is tiny enough to be populated only by himself, a cat and sheep, he has discovered a horrible truth: the man who loved islands turns out to hate himself.
At seventy-two, Pauline Attenborough could still sometimes be mistaken, in the half-light, for thirty.
Pauline is, of course, the title character of this story. But how, one must inquire, could a 72-year-old woman possibly be mistaken for a woman less than half that age, no matter how flattering the lighting? Either the narrator is speaking for Pauline who is clearly delusional or there is something more than meets the eye going on here. Consider this to be Lawrence's entry into the world of vampire fiction, but not necessarily in a distinctly literal mode.
Bircumshaw heard his wife’s friend take her leave. He had been in torment while the two women were together in the far-off kitchen. Now the brute in him felt more sure, more triumphant. He was afraid of two women: he could cow one.
Mr. Bircumshaw is a brute. He beats his child and bullies his way, playing the tyrant at home to make up for being a just another oppressed victim everywhere else. The allusion to the muscular strong-man of the Bible whose power resides in his long flowing locks is purely symbolic. Mr. Bircumshaw is shorn of his petty tyranny, to be sure, but the secret to his power lies not on his head, but in simple arithmetic.
