Dec 30, 2009

Odour of Chrysanthemums | Critical Overview

Early reviews of The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, R. P. Draper notes, while highly critical of the collection’s title story, afforded ‘‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’’ high praise. More recent responses to the short story, such as those of Keith Cushman, Nora Foster Stovel, and John Worthen, have also stressed its technical brilliance, by examining the differences between its three versions, and the ways in which it slowly reveals its theme. Weldon Thornton, for example, writes that ‘‘What Lawrence wrestled with in his successive revisions of the story was not the...