#000122
Women in Love
D. H. Lawrence
Often considered Lawrence's masterpiece, *Women in Love* follows two sisters—Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen—and the two men they become entangled with, tracing their relationships toward very different fates. A sequel of sorts to *The Rainbow*, it was written during the First World War and carries that catastrophe in its bones: a sense that European civilization is running toward destruction, mirrored in the characters' battles between love and will. Lawrence pushes fiction toward something almost prophetic, with charged, sometimes strange passages about desire, power, and the machine age. It demands patience and rewards it. For readers ready to meet Lawrence at full stretch—difficult, visionary, unlike anyone else—it's the central novel, the one where his quarrel with the modern world reaches its most ambitious and unsettling form.
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The author
D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) wrote Women in Love at the height of his powers, during and just after the First World War, a period of exile, poverty, and persecution over his German-born wife Frieda and his anti-war views. The strain shows productively in the book's apocalyptic undertow.
The book
Completed around 1916–17 and first published in 1920, it continues the story of the Brangwen sisters from The Rainbow, following Ursula's love for Rupert Birkin and Gudrun's destructive bond with the industrialist Gerald Crich. Ideas about love, will, and mechanization drive it as much as plot.
How it has aged
It is now regarded as one of the great modernist novels, though its dense, essayistic passages and insistent symbolism divide readers. Its exploration of relationships and its critique of industrial society keep it strikingly contemporary.
For more context
The Rainbow had been banned for obscenity in 1915, which shaped the troubled path Women in Love took to publication and hardened Lawrence's antagonism toward English respectability.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- D. H. Lawrence
- Year
- 1920
- ISBN
- None
- Format
- Hardcover
- Shelf
- Fiction
- Location
- Maine
Green library binding set