The Lost Girl

A draper's daughter in a dying Midlands town turns down every safe offer, trains as a maternity nurse, joins a troupe of touring music-hall players, and follows one of them to a village in the Abruzzi where the snow cuts the road for months. Lawrence was a miner's son and a schoolteacher's, and he won the James Tait Black Prize for this in 1920 — the only prize he ever got. The descent is the whole point, and he does not call it a fall. Forty-nine plates by painters including Edvard Munch and Spencer Gore trace the streets, fields and figures of the same northbound leaving, from 1841 to 1925.