This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. The Lost Girl is the story of Alvina Houghton, the daughter of an English draper with more imagination than sense, who falls in love with an Italian player in an itinerant variety act. Despite herself, she is attracted by his animal sexuality, and she abandons the mediocrity of a town and people that never understood her father's dream, to marry her lover and move to Italy to live with him. In the background of a remote mountain village, with the tremors of war steadily encroaching into their daily lives, they must resolve their relationship. The Lost Girl is D. H. Lawrence's only contribution to ever win an official literary tribute during his lifetime. It is a crucial step, in Lawrence's personal and artistic journey of looking for an alternative to the mindless industrialization of the West, of breaking the wall of Victorian prudery and sentimentality, of propounding and frankly portraying his belief in sexual freedom-taking along both the serious student and the merely curious into the workings of his genius.