We gotta get out of this place: Lawrence and emigration

The story Daughters of the Vicar continues to expound, expand on, espouse Lawrence's perpetual themes and contrasts: the aspirations of the sensitive and urbane souls living among the crude and violent families of the mining towns in Nottinghamshire, the contrast between relationships with strong sexual bonds and repressed relationship, between instinct and learning - though in this story seen largely from the female POV, in contrast with most of DHL's early works that in one way or another present and develop these conflicts from the male, his, POV: his suffering, his devotion to his mother, his fear of his father, his struggle with his father to win his mother's affections. Here the story built on 2 sister, the Vicar's daughters, and as this long story evolves it becomes more clear that older sister, Mary, has chosen a nonsexual marriage with the socially acceptable young vicar - who, despite his physical frailties dominates her and is her "master" - and younger sister who, as story ends, has just had sex with and is about to marry one of the miners, supposedly beneath her in class and learning, but a strong physical presence and presumably a good man and potentially a good husband, as evidence by his devotion to his cranky mother - yet there are dark elements here, just as there are hopeful elements (from DHL viewpoint, anyway) in the older sister's marriage: her husband isn't so weak that he can't be the "master" of the household; and in younger sister's marriage the husband, despite his tenderness, has been essentially virginal his whole life - he's 30, and spent 10 years in the British navy no less. So it's unclear what to make of these relationships, or what DHL makes of them, except to say that every one of his portraits of the mining towns is bleak and dark and nearly hopeless - you could say that either of these two marriages could work out well, but we suspect that they will not - there are two many cracks in the foundation, so to speak, from the either marriage to hold up successfully over time. There's talk of emigration to Canada - and I sense that's where Lawrence's heart is: the mining towns such as his own native town are toxic environments to love, sex, art, and all fine feeling, and the only way to truly prosper (not financially - intellectually, physically, sexually) is to get out. For Lawrence, more than for almost any other writer, environment influences character and fate - one of the themes of his writing, and of his short, peripatetic life.