Rawdon's Roof.

Summary paragraph - Rawdon's Roof Published in 1928 as the seventh title in Elkin Mathews's Woburn Books series, Rawdon's Roof is one of D.H. Lawrence's least-known and most carefully crafted late short fictions, issued in a limited edition of 530 numbered copies signed by the author. The story is told by a friend of Rawdon, a fastidious bachelor who has made it the governing principle of his household that no woman shall sleep beneath his roof - a declaration the narrator takes at first for the harmless eccentricity of a confirmed solitary. As the tale unfolds, however, the principle proves anything but harmless. A late-night visit from a married woman of Rawdon's acquaintance, the unexplained presence of her husband at an awkward hour, and a series of small observations the narrator pieces together expose the secret arrangement that the rule has been designed to conceal. Working in the compressed mode of his later short fiction, Lawrence turns the slight occasion into a study of evasion, sexual hypocrisy, and the elaborate codes by which the English middle class of his day conducted, and denied, its private lives. Bibliographically, the Woburn Books edition is among the most desirable of all Lawrence's separately published short works, and the signed limitation has long been sought after by collectors of Lawrence first editions and of the fine small-press publishing of the late 1920s.