How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
"Come, come on in," she said more gently, "it's getting dark. There's your grandfather's engine coming down the line!" (1.12)
This story is very heavy on emphasizing family relationships in discussing/describing characters. For example, grandpa never gets a name; we just know that he's Elizabeth's father and John's grandfather.
Quote #2
It was her father. She went in, saying she would mash. Directly, she returned.
"I didn't come to see you on Sunday," began the little grey-bearded man.
"I didn't expect you," said his daughter.
The engine-driver winced; then, reassuming his cheery, airy manner, he said: "Oh, have you heard then? Well, and what do you think—?"
"I think it is soon enough," she replied.
At her brief censure the little man made an impatient gesture, and said coaxingly, yet with dangerous coldness: "Well, what's a man to do? It's no sort of life for a man of my years, to sit at my own hearth like a stranger. And if I'm going to marry again it may as well be soon as late—what does it matter to anybody?" (1.18-25)
We're not quite sure what's going on here, but it sounds like father and daughter are at odds about some decision the former has made. It seems like perhaps he is thinking about remarrying? Apparently, he doesn't enjoy sitting home alone—and we can't say we blame him. Note, too, that neither one of them is referred to by name; they are only "his daughter" and "her father."
Quote #3
It was half-past four. They had but to await the father's coming to begin tea. As the mother watched her son's sullen little struggle with the wood, she saw herself in his silence and pertinacity; she saw the father in her child's indifference to all but himself. She seemed to be occupied by her husband. (1.36)
This passage is just chock-full of examples of Lawrence's tendency to avoid names and instead identify people by their family relationships. It's so excessive here that it really forces you to consider what Lawrence achieves through these choices—why is he so insistent on draining his characters of individuality/boiling them down to their family roles?
Quote #4
Directly, gratefully, came quick young steps to the door. Someone hung on the latch a moment, then a little girl entered and began pulling off her outdoor things, dragging a mass of curls, just ripening from gold to brown, over her eyes with her hat.
Her mother chid her for coming late from school, and said she would have to keep her at home the dark winter days. (1.38-39)
In yet another example of how the story emphasizes characters' family roles over their individuality, our introduction to Annie is pretty odd. At first, the narrator refers to her simply as "a little girl," making her sound like some random who has just shown up in the house unannounced. We only learn what Annie's role in the family is in passing, when the narrator refers to Elizabeth as her mother. Strange, no?
Quote #5
Nevertheless she took a paper spill from a sheaf on the mantelpiece and proceeded to light the lamp that hung from the ceiling in the middle of the room. As she reached up, her figure displayed itself just rounding with maternity. (1.65)
This is the first mention of the fact that Elizabeth is pregnant with her third child. Lawrence doesn't make a big deal of it, just slipping it in quickly in Elizabeth's chat with her daughter.
Quote #6
At a quarter to ten there were footsteps. One person! She watched for the door to open. It was an elderly woman, in a black bonnet and a black woollen shawl—his mother. She was about sixty years old, pale, with blue eyes, and her face all wrinkled and lamentable. She shut the door and turned to her daughter-in-law peevishly. (2.41)
In this moment, we meet Walter's mother (i.e., Elizabeth's mother-in-law). She never gets a name, and you'll see here that Elizabeth isn't named either; only their family relationships are emphasized.
Quote #7
"We must lay him out," the wife said. She put on the kettle, then returning knelt at the feet, and began to unfasten the knotted leather laces. (2.116)
Oddly, Lawrence refers to Elizabeth here not as "Elizabeth" or even "Walter's wife," but simply "the wife." We wonder why Lawrence chooses to depersonalize her so much at this particular moment. Does it work, or is it just weird?
Quote #8
They never forgot it was death, and the touch of the man's dead body gave them strange emotions, different in each of the women; a great dread possessed them both, the mother felt the lie was given to her womb, she was denied; the wife felt the utter isolation of the human soul, the child within her was a weight apart from her. (2.122)
Elizabeth and her mother-in-law contemplate their roles as mothers in the wake of Walter's death. Unsurprisingly, the impact of this event has not been positive . . .
Quote #9
He and she were only channels through which life had flowed to issue in the children. She was a mother—but how awful she knew it now to have been a wife. And he, dead now, how awful he must have felt it to be a husband. (2.130)
Elizabeth is mulling the wife-husband relationship that has just ended with Walter's death. As noted elsewhere (see "Marriage"), the death has brought her into some kind of crisis and caused her to reevaluate her whole relationship with her husband.
Quote #10
Elizabeth turned without answering, though she strove to weep and behave as her mother-in-law expected. (2.132)
Elizabeth seems to be struggling in figuring out how to "act right"—or, at least, act right in a way that her mother-in-law would recognize as such. Apparently, the death has totally thrown her out of her typical groove and made it hard for her to play the family role assigned to her . . .