" "I want us to be together without bothering about ourselves- to be really together because we ARE together, as if it were a phenomenon, not a thing we have to maintain by our own effort." " D. H. Lawrence's sequel to his earlier novel 'The Rainbow' (1915) follows the continuing loves and lives of the Brangwen sisters, Gudrun and Ursula. Gudrun Brangwen, an artist, pursues a destructive relationship with Gerald Crich, an industrialist. Lawrence contrasts this pair with the love that develops between Ursula and Rupert ...
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" "I want us to be together without bothering about ourselves- to be really together because we ARE together, as if it were a phenomenon, not a thing we have to maintain by our own effort." " D. H. Lawrence's sequel to his earlier novel 'The Rainbow' (1915) follows the continuing loves and lives of the Brangwen sisters, Gudrun and Ursula. Gudrun Brangwen, an artist, pursues a destructive relationship with Gerald Crich, an industrialist. Lawrence contrasts this pair with the love that develops between Ursula and Rupert Birkin, an alienated intellectual who articulates many opinions associated with the author. The emotional relationships thus established are given further depth and tension by an intense psychological and physical attraction between Gerald and Rupert. The novel ranges over the whole of British society before the time of the First World War and eventually ends high up in the snows of the Tyrolean Alps. Ursula's character draws on Lawrence's wife Frieda, and Gudrun on Katherine Mansfield, while Rupert Birken has elements of Lawrence himself, and Gerald Crich of Mansfield's husband, John Middleton Murry.
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Asked to name the ten greatest novels of the 20th Century very few well read people would leave this explosive, sensitive novel off the list. Lawrence had so many artistic talents - poet, essayist, travel writer, painter. But above all his best novels display all of these talents; and none more so than "Women in Love."
Many may disagree with his convictions that drive his characters in this powerfully unfolding tale, but somehow faulting what Lawrence believes, or for that matter, what his creations do to themselves and others, seems especially beside the point, as the poetic passion simply drowns any cool headed intellectual attempt to reduce the raw recreation of experience with such precision.
This is not suggest that Lawrence lacked the deep intelligence to delve into what it means to be human and expose the frailty of his passionate conduct. He senses with a sure instinct that it is this very passion that makes us all so vulnerable. Yet, he nevertheless shows us in scene after unfolding scene that being false to our true selves leads to even greater misery: the reductive misery of unfulfillment..
