# The Trespasser (book)
*The Trespasser* is the title, or close variant of the title, of several unrelated published books, of which the two most prominent are [D. H. Lawrence](https://www.edgepedia.org/d-h-lawrence)'s second novel (1912) and [Tana French](https://www.edgepedia.org/tana-french)'s sixth Dublin Murder Squad crime novel (2016). A late Victorian novel by Gilbert Parker (1893), a Maine game-warden mystery by Paul Doiron (*Trespasser*, 2011), and a young-adult thriller by Jennifer Lynn Alvarez (*The Trespassers*, 2025) share the title as well.
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| D. H. Lawrence, *The Trespasser* | Second novel; published May 1912 by Duckworth & Co., London, iv + 292 pages[1](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/70398/70398-h/70398-h.htm) |
| Origin of Lawrence's novel | Based on autobiographical writings of Helen Corke about her love affair with the married Herbert Baldwin Macartney, who died by suicide in August 1909[2](https://assets.cambridge.org/052139/1822/sample/0521391822WS.pdf) |
| Lawrence's American edition | Published from the Duckworth sheets by Mitchell Kennerley, New York, 1912[1](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/70398/70398-h/70398-h.htm) |
| Tana French, *The Trespasser* | Sixth Dublin Murder Squad novel; Viking hardcover, October 2016, 449 pages; narrator Detective Antoinette Conway[3](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780670026333) |
| French's recognition | Winner of the Irish Book Awards Crime Fiction Book of the Year and a Richard & Judy pick[4](https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/tana-french/the-trespasser/9781444755664/) |
| Author sales | French's novels have sold over eight million copies worldwide[5](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/75673/tana-french/) |
| Other titled books | Gilbert Parker's *The Trespasser* (1893)[6](https://www.abebooks.com/products/isbn/9783387491487); Paul Doiron's *Trespasser* (2011)[7](https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-312-55847-5); Jennifer Lynn Alvarez's *The Trespassers* (352 pages, YA thriller)[8](https://www.penguin.co.nz/books/the-trespassers-9780593900611) |
## D. H. Lawrence, The Trespasser (1912)
**A novel with a private origin.** *The Trespasser* was Lawrence's second novel, published in May 1912 by Duckworth & Co. of Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, in a crown octavo (A small book format, roughly 7 by 5 inches) volume of 292 pages bound in dark blue cloth[1](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/70398/70398-h/70398-h.htm). While Lawrence was a teacher in Croydon, his friend Helen Corke gave him notes on her love affair with a musician, Herbert Baldwin Macartney, a married man who killed himself in August 1909 immediately after a short holiday the two had shared on the [Isle of Wight](https://www.edgepedia.org/isle-of-wight). Lawrence read and adapted her writings and took his own part in the tale; Corke gave her permission for the publication of the private, tragic material[2](https://assets.cambridge.org/052139/1822/sample/0521391822WS.pdf).
Lawrence began the book in April 1910 under the working title "The Saga of Siegmund"; other titles considered before publication were "Trespassers in Cythera", "A Game of Forfeits", and "The Man and the Dreaming Woman"[2](https://assets.cambridge.org/052139/1822/sample/0521391822WS.pdf). Between a first draft written rapidly in the spring and summer of 1910 and his final revisions in early 1912, his view of Corke and of her story changed; the surviving manuscript was the basis of the later Cambridge edition, which restored his sentence structure and punctuation and corrected typesetters' errors[9](https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7199784M/The_trespasser).
**A troubled path to print.** By the spring of 1911, adverse criticism from Ford Madox Hueffer, together with Lawrence's own reservations, caused Lawrence to decide against publication; Hueffer judged the book too "erotic", and Lawrence feared it might damage his reputation[2](https://assets.cambridge.org/052139/1822/sample/0521391822WS.pdf). Hueffer (later known as [Ford Madox Ford](https://www.edgepedia.org/ford-madox-ford)) had already hailed Lawrence's first novel *The White Peacock* as containing genius despite its faults, and he described *The Trespasser* to the author, in similar paradoxical terms, as a "rotten work of genius"[10](https://academic.oup.com/camqtly/article-abstract/51/2/106/6617205). The book nonetheless appeared in 1912, and the first American edition, printed from the Duckworth sheets, was issued by Mitchell Kennerley of New York the same year[1](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/70398/70398-h/70398-h.htm).
Lawrence himself later dismissed his first two novels, writing while at work on *Sons and Lovers* that [Paul Morel](https://www.edgepedia.org/paul-morel) "will be a novel, not a florid prose poem, or a decorated idyll running to seed in realism"; later critics have found these phrases acute for *The Trespasser* yet unfair, since the book stands as a distinctive achievement in its own right[11](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/d-h-lawrence-language-and-being/competing-voices-in-the-early-novels/B3446638AC6A02875ED23D19005A2F11). A 1962 College English essay by Leo Gurko called the novel "D. H. Lawrence's Neglected Novel" and judged it both an essential prefiguration of the later work and a striking achievement in itself[12](https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ce196228125). A scholarly curiosity attaches to the title: the word "trespass" never appears anywhere in the novel that bears it[13](https://journalofdhlawrencestudies.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/jdhls-2017-holly-laird.pdf). The [Cambridge University Press](https://www.edgepedia.org/cambridge-university-press) edition appeared in 1981, edited by Elizabeth Mansfield with an introduction exploring the novel's background, publication history, and reception[9](https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7199784M/The_trespasser).
## Tana French, The Trespasser (2016)
**A murder squad case from the inside.** Tana French's *The Trespasser*, published by Viking in October 2016 (449 pages in hardcover, priced at $27), is the sixth and final novel of her Dublin Murder Squad sequence[3](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780670026333) • [14](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/07/the-trespasser-tana-french-review-crime-novel). The narrator is Detective Antoinette Conway, the squad's only woman, an abrasive mixed-race working-class detective worn down by harassment from her colleagues, working with her partner Stephen Moran[15](https://www.sfchronicle.com/books/article/The-Trespasser-by-Tana-French-9971784.php). The pair are typically assigned "domestics", slam-dunk cases requiring little investigative work, and the novel opens with what looks like another one: the young woman Aislinn Murray found dead in her apartment beside a table set for a romantic dinner[3](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780670026333) • [15](https://www.sfchronicle.com/books/article/The-Trespasser-by-Tana-French-9971784.php). There are no signs of forced entry, and Conway, who has seen the victim somewhere before, resists the pressure of a more experienced detective, Breslin, to charge Aislinn's boyfriend, Rory Fallon[15](https://www.sfchronicle.com/books/article/The-Trespasser-by-Tana-French-9971784.php).
French built the series not around a single investigator but by giving each book a different squad member as narrator, who appears in other books as a partner or minor character; the six books do not form an official series and can be read in any order[16](https://time.com/4520934/murder-she-wrote/). Critics located the book's core in its treatment of storytelling: detective work becomes a type of narrative-making, and the mystery centers on a victim whose bland personality and generic good looks may have been adopted for sinister purposes[15](https://www.sfchronicle.com/books/article/The-Trespasser-by-Tana-French-9971784.php) • [16](https://time.com/4520934/murder-she-wrote/). The *Publishers Weekly* review praised the tense interrogation scenes but found the pacing shaky and the backstories less well woven in than usual[3](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780670026333).
**Reception and standing.** The book won the Irish Book Awards Crime Fiction Book of the Year and was selected as a Richard & Judy pick[4](https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/tana-french/the-trespasser/9781444755664/). French's novels as a body have sold over eight million copies worldwide and won the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, and Barry Awards, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Mystery/[Thriller](https://www.edgepedia.org/thriller-genre), and the Irish Book Award for Crime Fiction[5](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/75673/tana-french/). Reader ratings on [Goodreads](https://www.edgepedia.org/goodreads) for the 2017 Penguin paperback average 3.96 across 37,846 ratings[17](https://www.goodreads.com/work/editions/48321130-the-trespasser?page=1).
## Other books bearing the title
Several other works use the title or a plural variant. Gilbert Parker's *The Trespasser*, first published in 1893, is a late nineteenth-century novel following a man of mixed ancestry who returns from the Canadian wilderness to claim his ancestral English estate amid family tension[6](https://www.abebooks.com/products/isbn/9783387491487). Paul Doiron's *Trespasser* (Minotaur, 2011, 320 pages) is the sequel to his debut *The Poacher's Son*, following Maine game warden Mike Bowditch's investigation of a murdered woman on a remote road[7](https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-312-55847-5). Jennifer Lynn Alvarez's *The Trespassers*, a young-adult thriller of 352 pages from RHUS Children's Books (eBook and audiobook released 28 October 2025, paperback 20 January 2026), follows four Alaskan teenagers whose reunion house party turns deadly[8](https://www.penguin.co.nz/books/the-trespassers-9780593900611). Nick Hayes's *The Trespasser's Companion* ([Bloomsbury](https://www.edgepedia.org/bloomsbury), 2022, 288 pages), a non-fiction field guide on access to land, is a companion to *The Book of Trespass* rather than a novel of the same title[18](https://www.ecos.org.uk/book-review-the-trespassers-companion/).
The title's durability across genres reflects the word's range. A trespasser is literally one who enters without right, but, as the *Los Angeles Review of Books* observed of French's title, the word also carries the biblical sense of "those who trespass against us", a sin or betrayal, so that a book called *The Trespasser* may be about an intruder on land, an intruder on a life, or both[19](https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/forensic-thousand-one-nights).
## References
1. [Edward D. McDonald (1925). A Bibliography of the Writings of D. H. Lawrence, Project Gutenberg](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/70398/70398-h/70398-h.htm)
2. [Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D. H. Lawrence, frontmatter sample for The Trespasser](https://assets.cambridge.org/052139/1822/sample/0521391822WS.pdf)
3. [Review of The Trespasser by Tana French, Publishers Weekly (2016)](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780670026333)
4. [The Trespasser by Tana French, Hachette UK](https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/tana-french/the-trespasser/9781444755664/)
5. [Tana French, Penguin Random House author page](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/75673/tana-french/)
6. [The Trespasser by Gilbert Parker, AbeBooks edition details](https://www.abebooks.com/products/isbn/9783387491487)
7. [Review of Trespasser by Paul Doiron, Publishers Weekly (2011)](https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-312-55847-5)
8. [The Trespassers by Jennifer Lynn Alvarez, Penguin Books New Zealand](https://www.penguin.co.nz/books/the-trespassers-9780593900611)
9. [The trespasser by D. H. Lawrence, Open Library](https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7199784M/The_trespasser)
10. [Max Saunders (2022). 'Rotten Work of Genius': Ford Madox Ford and D. H. Lawrence, The Cambridge Quarterly 51(2)](https://academic.oup.com/camqtly/article-abstract/51/2/106/6617205)
11. [Michael Bell. Competing voices in the early novels, D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being, Cambridge University Press](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/d-h-lawrence-language-and-being/competing-voices-in-the-early-novels/B3446638AC6A02875ED23D19005A2F11)
12. [Leo Gurko (1962). The Trespasser: D. H. Lawrence's Neglected Novel, College English 24(1)](https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ce196228125)
13. [Holly Laird (2017). Configurations of Trespass in the Works of D. H. Lawrence, Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies](https://journalofdhlawrencestudies.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/jdhls-2017-holly-laird.pdf)
14. [The Trespasser by Tana French review, The Guardian (2016)](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/07/the-trespasser-tana-french-review-crime-novel)
15. [Anita Felicelli (2016). 'The Trespasser,' by Tana French, San Francisco Chronicle](https://www.sfchronicle.com/books/article/The-Trespasser-by-Tana-French-9971784.php)
16. [Murder, She Wrote: Review of Tana French's The Trespasser, Time (2016)](https://time.com/4520934/murder-she-wrote/)
17. [Editions of The Trespasser by Tana French, Goodreads](https://www.goodreads.com/work/editions/48321130-the-trespasser?page=1)
18. [Simon Leadbeater. Book Review: The Trespasser's Companion, ECOS](https://www.ecos.org.uk/book-review-the-trespassers-companion/)
19. [A Forensic Thousand-and-One Nights, Los Angeles Review of Books](https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/forensic-thousand-one-nights)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Literature and written works › Creative written works and worlds › Genre fiction categories › Crime, mystery, and thriller › Detective and mystery fiction*
*Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
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