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Women in Love (Paperback)
by D.H. Lawrence
| Category:
Literature, Classic, Fiction |
| Market price: ¥ 78.00
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¥ 68.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
Poetic, disturbing, thought-provoking, Women in Love is a book about individual philosophies, personalities, desires, and the conscious or subconscious need for control in relationships. |
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Author: D.H. Lawrence
Publisher: Bantam Classics
Pub. in: February, 1996
ISBN: 0553214543
Pages: 560
Measurements: 6.9 x 4.2 x 1 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00793
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0553214543
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- Awards & Credential -
Women in Love is widely regarded as D.H. Lawrence' best novel. It's the continuation of the Rainbow. |
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- MSL Picks -
D.H. Lawrence's magnificent exploration of human sexuality in the days surrounding World War I.
"Let us hesitate no longer to announce that the sensual passions and mysteries are equally sacred with the spiritual mysteries and passions," wrote D.H. Lawrence in Women In Love, a masterpiece that heralded the erotic consciousness of the twentieth century. Echoing elements of Lawrence's own life, Women In Love delves into the mysteries between men and women as two couples strive for love against a haunting backdrop of coal mines, factories, and a beleaguered working class.
(Quoring from The Publisher)
Target readers:
Fans of D.H. Lawrence, readers who are addicted to the writting style that reveals the deepth of spiritual mysteries and passions of human being.
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D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930), English novelist, storywriter, critic, poet and painter, one of the greatest figures in 20th-century English literature. "Snake" and "How Beastly the Bourgeoisie is" are probably his most anthologized poems.
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Novel by D.H. Lawrence, privately printed in 1920 and published commercially in 1921. Following the characters Lawrence had created for The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love examines the ill effects of industrialization on the human psyche, resolving that individual and collective rebirth is possible only through human intensity and passion. Women in Love contrasts the love affair of Rupert Birkin and Ursula Brangwen with that of Gudrun, Ursula's artistic sister, and Gerald Crich, a domineering industrialist. Birkin, an introspective misanthrope, struggles to reconcile his metaphysical drive for self-fulfillment with Ursula's practical view of sentimental passion. Their love affair and eventual marriage are set as a positive antithesis to the destructive relationship of Gudrun and Crich. The novel also explores the relationship between Birkin and Crich. According to critics, Birkin is a self-portrait of Lawrence, and Ursula represents Lawrence's wife, Frieda.
(MSL quote from The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature)
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Sisters
Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their father's house in Beldover, working and talking. Ursula was stitching a piece of brightly-coloured embroidery, and Gudrun was drawing upon a board which she held on her knee. They were mostly silent, talking as their thoughts strayed through their minds.
"Ursula," said Gudrun, "don't you really want to get married?"
Ursula laid her embroidery in her lap and looked up. Her face was calm and considerate.
"I don't know," she replied. "It depends how you mean."
Gudrun was slightly taken aback. She watched her sister for some moments.
"Well," she said, ironically, "it usually means one thing!--But don't you think, anyhow, you'd be-" she darkened slightly-"in a better position than you are in now?"
A shadow came over Ursula's face.
"I might," she said. "But I'm not sure."
Again Gudrun paused, slightly irritated. She wanted to be quite definite.
"You don't think one needs the experience of having been married?" she asked.
"Do you think it need be an experience?" replied Ursula.
"Bound to be, in some way or other," said Gudrun, coolly. "Possibly undesirable, but bound to be an experience of some sort."
"Not really," said Ursula. "More likely to be the end of experience."
Gudrun sat very still, to attend to this.
"Of course," she said, "there's that to consider."
This brought the conversation to a close. Gudrun, almost angrily, took up her rubber and began to rub out part of her drawing. Ursula stitched absorbedly.
"You wouldn't consider a good offer?" asked Gudrun.
"I think I've rejected several," said Ursula.
"Really!" Gudrun flushed dark.--"But anything really worth while? Have you really?"
"A thousand a year, and an awfully nice man. I liked him awfully," said Ursula.
"Really! But weren't you fearfully tempted?"
"In the abstract--but not in the concrete," said Ursula. "When it comes to the point, one isn't even tempted.--Oh, if I were tempted, I'd marry like a shot.--I'm only tempted not to." The faces of both sisters suddenly lit up with amusement.
"Isn't it an amazing thing," cried Gudrun, "how strong the temptation is, not to!"
They both laughed, looking at each other. In their hearts they were frightened.
There was a long pause, whilst Ursula stitched and Gudrun went on with her sketch. The sisters were women, Ursula twenty-six and Gudrun twenty-five. But both had the remote, virgin look of modern girls, sisters of Artemis rather than of Hebe. Gudrun was very beautiful, passive, soft-skinned, soft-limbed. She wore a dress of dark-blue silky stuff, with ruches of blue and green linen lace in the neck and sleeves; and she had emerald-green stockings. Her look of confidence and diffidence contrasted with Ursula's sensitive expectancy. The provincial people, intimidated by Gudrun's perfect sang froid and exclusive bareness of manner, said of her: "She is a smart woman." She had just come back from London, where she had spent several years, working at an art-school, as a student, and living a studio life.
"I was hoping now for a man to come along," Gudrun said, suddenly catching her underlip between her teeth, and making a strange grimace, half sly smiling, half anguish.
Ursula was afraid.
"So you have come home, expecting him here?" she laughed.
"Oh my dear," cried Gudrun, strident, "I wouldn't go out of my way to look for him. But if there did happen to come along a highly attractive individual of sufficient means--well--" she tailed off ironically. Then she looked searchingly at Ursula, as if to probe her. "Don't you find yourself getting bored?" she asked of her sister. "Don't you find, that things fail to materialise? Nothing materialises! Everything withers in the bud."
"What withers in the bud?" asked Ursula.
"Oh, everything--oneself--things in general."
There was a pause, whilst each sister vaguely considered her fate.
"It does frighten one," said Ursula, and again there was a pause. "But do you hope to get anywhere by just marrying?"
"It seems to be the inevitable next step," said Gudrun.
Ursula pondered this, with a little bitterness. She was a class mistress herself, in Willey Green Grammar School, as she had been for some years.
"I know," she said, "it seems like that when one thinks in the abstract. But really imagine it: imagine any man one knows, imagine him coming home to one every evening, and saying "Hello,' and giving one a kiss--"
There was a blank pause.
"Yes," said Gudrun, in a narrowed voice. "It's just impossible. The man makes it impossible."
"Of course there's children--" said Ursula, doubtfully.
Gudrun's face hardened.
"Do you really want children, Ursula?" she asked coldly.
A dazzled, baffled look came on Ursula's face.
"One feels it is still beyond one," she said.
"Do you feel like that?" asked Gudrun. "I get no feeling whatever from the thought of bearing children."
Gudrun looked at Ursula with a mask-like, expressionless face. Ursula knitted her brows.
"Perhaps it isn't genuine," she faltered. "Perhaps one doesn't really want them, in one's soul--only superficially."
A hardness came over Gudrun's face. She did not want to be too definite.
"When one thinks of other people's children--" said Ursula.
Again Gudrun looked at her sister, almost hostile.
"Exactly," she said, to close the conversation.
The two sisters worked on in silence, Ursula having always that strange brightness of an essential flame that is caught, meshed, contravened. She lived a good deal by herself, to herself, working, passing on from day to day, and always thinking, trying to lay hold on life, to grasp it in her own understanding. Her active living was suspended, but underneath, in the darkness, something was coming to pass. If only she could break through the last integuments! She seemed to try to put her hands out, like an infant in the womb, and she could not, not yet. Still she had a strange prescience, an intimation of something yet to come.
She laid down her work and looked at her sister. She thought Gudrun so charming, so infinitely charming, in her softness and her fine, exquisite richness of texture and delicacy of line. There was a certain playfulness about her too, such a piquancy of ironic suggestion, such an untouched reserve. Ursula admired her with all her soul.
"Why did you come home, Prune?" she asked.
Gudrun knew she was being admired. She sat back from her drawing and looked at Ursula, from under her finely-curved lashes.
"Why did I come back, Ursula?" she repeated. "I have asked myself, a thousand times."
"And don't you know?"
"Yes, I think I do. I think my coming back home was just reculer pour mieux sauter."
And she looked with a long, slow look of knowledge at Ursula.
"I know!" cried Ursula, looking slightly dazzled and falsified, and as if she did not know. "But where can one jump to?"
"Oh, it doesn't matter," said Gudrun, somewhat superbly. "If one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere."
"But isn't it very risky?" asked Ursula.
A slow, mocking smile dawned on Gudrun's face.
"Ah!" she said, laughing. "What is it all but words!"
And so again she closed the conversation. But Ursula was still brooding.
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Fletcher (MSL quote), USA
<2007-03-09 00:00>
I think Women in Love must be just about the most emotionally intense book I've ever read. D.H. Lawrence conjures his four main characters in what feels like the heat of a closed-room kiln. The writing is beautiful and amazingly perceptive, but is at times stultifyingly over-analytical.
Yet, despite the book's combined length, density and decided lack of plot, Women in Love is surprisingly readable. What makes this book so good is the honesty with which Lawrence imbues his two title characters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, and their two chosen lovers, Birkin and Gerald. It can be frustrating to read page after page of the mental thrashings of an individual mind's search for truth and authenticity in life and in love, but it can also be a kind of revelation.
These characters think differently about the world around them than I do, and we each think differently about the world than you who are reading this do. And yet we are all basically the same on a certain transcendent level. We are all human and we all long for an authentic connection with the world around us. We are different and we are the same. That's why living in this world isn't always easy, and that's why it's always worthwhile. This book beautifully and even entertainingly captures those basic struggles for human connection and if for that reason alone, it's well worth reading. Highly recommended.
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Mary Whipple (MSL quote), USA
<2007-03-09 00:00>
Written in 1920 and often regarded as D. H. Lawrence's greatest novel, Women in Love is the complex story of two women and two men who scrutinize their lives and personal needs in an effort to discover something that makes the future worth living. The personal and social traumas of post-World War I, combined with the rise of industry and urbanization, have affected all four main characters, often at cross purposes as they explore love and its role in their lives. Intensely introspective and self-conscious, each character shares his/her thoughts with the reader, allowing the reader to participate in the inner conflicts and crises that each faces.
Ursula Brangwen, a teacher in a mining town in the Midlands, is attracted to Rupert Birkin, a school supervisor; her sister Gudrun, an artist whose sculptures have drawn some attention in London, is drawn to Gerald Crich, whose father is a mine owner. As the two women earn their living and consider the issue of marriage, which they regard as an impediment to their independence, the men deal with issues of sexuality and power, and whether the love of a woman is enough. Both men have homosexual urges which compete with their feelings for women.
Gerald is the most conflicted of the four. Taking over the mines upon the death of his father, he is fiercely committed to making them successful, even if that means hardening his heart toward his workers. He feels no sense of responsibility toward them, dedicating his efforts toward success and power, an attitude he conveys also toward Gudrun, who finds him self-centered but physically attractive. Rupert Birkin, who is eventually drawn to Ursula, is often thought to have been modeled on Lawrence himself, and his sensitivity, self-analysis, and feeling that love is not enough--that one must progress beyond love to another plane - display the kind of agonized soul searching done by many other young men of his age following the horrors of the world war.
Extremely complex in its exploration of the period's social and philosophical influences on the characters (who are archetypes of society), the novel is also full of symbolism, with many parallels drawn between love and death, which the characters sometimes prefer to life. As the love affairs of these four characters play out, filled with complications, disagreements about the meaning of love, questions about love's relation to power and dominance, and the role of sexuality, Lawrence projects the tumult of post-war England as the values of the past yield to newer, more personal goals.
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-03-09 00:00>
A sequel to The Rainbow, Women in Love seems to be a more personal novel for its author, as D.H. Lawrence introduces a character to echo his own feelings about love and the world. This character is Rupert Birkin, a misanthrope who thumbs his nose defiantly at any and all social conventions and has few, if any, likeable qualities. It is this man with whom Ursula Brangwen, the individualistic heroine from The Rainbow, falls in love, but even she is not blind to his disagreeableness.
Ursula, now 26 years old, teaches in the school of her coalmining hometown, Beldover. In the first scene in the novel where she and Rupert, a school inspector, reveal their mutual acquaintance, they are standing in front of her class, transforming her botanical lecture into a wellspring of sexual innuendo in what appears to be Lawrence's playful attempt at provoking the censors who prudishly criticized his prior work. Also participating in this scene is Hermione Roddice, a haughty aristocratic woman who harbors a secret desire to humiliate and control men, specifically the headstrong Rupert.
Meanwhile, Ursula's prettier and more vivacious younger sister Gudrun, an artist, is attracted to Gerald Crich, heir to the seemingly cursed Crich coal dynasty. Almost the opposite of Rupert, Gerald is a proud, practical, and conscientious businessman who lays down the law with his coal miners and is cruel to his animals, feeling he deserves nothing less than unconditional obedience. The provocative nature of this novel is that Gerald is attracted to Rupert - socially, physically, sexually - possibly because he considers Rupert a symbol of liberation from the workaday world he is secretly tired of; and this feeling is readily reciprocated. In a scene where the two men strip and wrestle, Lawrence provides the male counterpart to the lesbian scene in "The Rainbow," as though to say what's good for the goose is good for the... well, you know.
The novel basically tracks the trajectories of the love/hate relationships of these two couples. While Ursula and Rupert eventually find compatibility, having in common their rugged individualism, Gerald and Gudrun drift towards a dysfunctional state of potential violence, as he realizes with jealousy and anger that her artistic world is closed to him.
Lawrence's strength is not tight little plots but character study, and the great achievement in "Women in Love" is that the characters do not exhibit any stereotypical or easily describable behavior; it's difficult to pinpoint their personalities from just one conversation, and not much easier even over the course of the entire novel. Ursula, Gudrun, Rupert, and Gerald are fascinatingly, almost frighteningly, complex people whom Lawrence seems deliberately to have designed to leave the reader at a loss, to test the reader's tolerance for sexual and psychological perversity.
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-03-09 00:00>
Set in the aftermath of World War I, this deeply philosophical novel brilliantly portrays Lawrence's fascination with the power and activity of the subconscious mind. Lawrence expertly strips away the surface levels of normal awareness and perception to reveal the forces working within the deep inner recesses of the human psyche. His interest in and fascination with the writings of Freud is everywhere made manifest in this story.
In every section of this brilliant book, the reader can grasp the characters' efforts to exert the will against the inviolable forces of nature. The end result, according to Lawrence, is that they sever the organic bond with the natural world and suffer a spiritual death. Through their struggles, we gain a sense of our own futile efforts to control reality, to make it over in our own image. We discover we must complete our being by living in the moment, submerging the self and uniting with others. Above all else, we learn about our true nature and the necessity of living in harmony with the ebb and flow of the larger universe. Buy Lawrence's book, and, more importantly, dwell on its depictions of the mind's power to deliver our destiny.
I highly recommend this masterpiece to all readers wishing to gain insight into human psychology and, ultimately, a truer picture of humanity. Although the book is quite long (nearly 500 pages) and doesn't have a unified plot structure, Lawrence rewards his beautiful bounty to the patient and careful reader.
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