E. M. Forster considered D. H. Lawrence the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation and his ingenuity is abundantly in evidence in these seven short novels. In The Captains Doll , The Fox andThe Ladybird, published together in 1923, Lawrence created a new form, formulating his views on power and leadership in the aftermath of the First World War. The four novellas that followed, including The Virgin and the Gipsy and The Princess, were some of the last fiction he was to write and are vital and beautifully shaped tales. And in St Mawr, set in New Mexico, and The Escaped Cock, an extraordinary reworking of the story of Christs resurrection, Lawrence evoked the richness and depth of myth.