The Virgin and the Gypsy

The tale relates the story of two sisters, daughters of an Anglican vicar, who return from finishing school overseas to a drab, lifeless rectory in the East Midlands, not long after the World War I.

Their mother has run off with another man, a scandal that is not talked about by the family, especially the girls' father, who was deeply humiliated and only remembers his wife as she was when they first met many years before.

Their new home is dominated by a blind and selfish grandmother called "Mater" and her mean-spirited, poisonous daughter Aunt Cissie; there is also Uncle Fred, who lives a solitary life.

While on a second visit to the gipsy family, she befriends a married Jewish woman who has left her husband and who is now living with her paramour, impatiently waiting for her divorce to come through.

Apparently, her father believes that one cannot associate with a wealthy divorced woman who is merely marrying a handsome man, who happens to be a war hero, as an excuse to dump her first and older husband.

In the nick of time, the brave gipsy man rescues Yvette despite the fact that the surprise flood washes most of the rectory away, drowning the grandmother.

A moving scene ensues as the gipsy hero breathes life and warmth back into the virginal Yvette, who feels the powerful attraction of his manhood and strength.

Her day-to-day experience and the responses of her family are intended to contrast the inexperience and desires of youth with the limitations imposed by the strictures of conventional society.

The theme of virginity, and its almost unconscious aspiration for experience, is synonymous with the collective desires for the entire society before it has been perverted by an education made of prejudice and inhibitions.

Lawrence portrays Yvette as unrestrained in a positive sense: She visits the gipsies and the unmarried couple without thinking about any social consequences.

At home, the stifling environment created by her Aunt Cissie and the indolent, annoying Mater drive Yvette to search for uncharted social waters.

A film adaptation was made in 1970, directed by Christopher Miles from a screenplay by Alan Plater starring Imogen Hassall, Joanna Shimkus, Franco Nero, Honor Blackman, Mark Burns and Fay Compton.