The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (1914) was Lawrence's first collection of stories, and it includes some of his finest and most distinctive fiction. The collection forms a bridge between his apprenticeship in realism, which culminated in Sons and Lovers, and the visionary language and historical sweep of The Rainbow. Lawrence's arrangement of the stories, restored for the first time in this edition, also offers his diagnosis of the development of British society and its literature between 1870 and the outbreak of the First World War. Widely praised stories such as 'Odour of Chrysanthemums', 'Daughters of the Vicar', and 'The Prussian Officer' show people moving from a communal world, in which they battle against poverty, class prejudice, and natural disaster, to a more independent existence, full of potential for both self-fulfilment and self-destruction. These short stories celebrate the vitality that is fundamental to Lawrence's vision of life, and demonstrate the diversity of interests, narrative power, and vivid sense of place and character that distinguish the works of an acknowledged master in the genre.