Books - Women in Love

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	Books - Women in Love

Women in Love is a novel by British author D. H. Lawrence published in 1920. It is a sequel to The Rainbow
(1915), following 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 novel ranges over the whole of British society at the time of the First World War and eventually ends high up in the snows of the European Alps.

Like most of his works, Women in Love caused controversy over its sexual subject matter. One early reviewer said of it "I do not claim to be a literary critic, but I know dirt when I smell it, and here is dirt in heaps — festering, putrid heaps which smell to high Heaven."

It was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film in 1969. It was one of the first theatrical movies to show male genitals, when Gerald Crich (Oliver Reed) and Rupert Birkin (Alan Bates) wrestle in the nude.

Plot Summary

Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen are two sisters living in the Midlands of England in the 1920s. Ursula is a teacher, Gudrun an artist. They meet two men who live nearby, Rupert Birkin and Gerald Cricht. The four become friends. Ursula begins to date Birkin and Gudrun eventually begins a love affair with Gerald.

The four are all deeply concerned with contemporary questions of society, politics, and the relationship between men and women. They go for a party at Gerald's manor house, but during the course of the evening, Gerald's sister, Diana, drowns. Gudrun becomes the teacher and mentor of his youngest sister. Soon Gerald's father passes away as well after a drawn-out illness.

Birkin asks Ursula to marry him, and she agrees. Gerald and Gudrun's relationship, however, is becoming more stormy. The four go on vacation together to the Alps. Gudrun begins an intense friendship with an artist she meets there called Loerk. Gerald cannot deal with this and their relationship begins to spiral out of control.

Editions

Women in Love (New York: Privately Printed by Thomas Seltzer, 1920).
Women in Love (London: Martin Seeker, 1921).
Women in Love, ed. Charles L. Ross (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1982).
Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). This edition is a volume in The Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D H Lawrence
Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995).
Women in Love, ed.David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
The First Women in Love (1916-17) edited by John Worthen and Lindeth Vasey,Cambridge University Press, 1998, ISBN 0521373263. This edition is a volume in The Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D H Lawrence and displays significant differences with the final published version
The 'Prologue' to Women in Love is a discarded section of an early version of the novel and is set four years after Gerald and Birkin have returned from a skiing holiday in the Tyrol. It is published as an appendix to the Cambridge edition, pp489-506

Literary criticism

Richard Beynon, (ed.), D. H. Lawrence: The Rainbow and Women in Love (Cambridge: Icon Books, 1997).
Michael Black (2001) Lawrence's England: The Major Fiction, 1913 - 1920 (Palgrave-MacMillan)
Paul Delaney (1979)D. H. Lawrence's Nightmare: The Writer and his Circle in the Years of the Great War (Hassocks: Harvester Press)
F R Leavis (1955) D H Lawrence: Novelist (London, Chatto and Windus)
F R Leavis (1976) Thought, Words and Creativity: Art and Thought in D H Lawrence (London, Chatto and Windus)

Charles L. Ross (1991) Women in Love: A Novel of Mythic Realism (Boston, Mass.: Twayne)
John Worthen,The Restoration of Women in Love, in Peter Preston and Peter Hoare (eds.)(1989), D H Lawrence in the Modern World (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan), pp7-26

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