All Topics  
Women in Love

 

   Email Print
   Bookmark   Link

 

Women in Love


 
 

Women in Love is a novelNovel

A novel is an extended, generally fictional narrative in prose....
 by BritishUnited Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

| align="center" colspan="2"| United Kingdom ofGreat Britain and Ireland...
 authorAuthor

An author is the person who creates a written work, such as a book, story, article, or the like, whether short or long, fict...
 D. H. LawrenceD. H. Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence was an important and controversial English writer of the 20th century, with his output spanning nove...
 published in 19201920 in literature

See also: 1919 in literature, other events of 1920, 1921 in literature, List of years in literature....
. It is a sequel to his earlier novel The RainbowThe Rainbow

The Rainbow is a 1915 novel by British author D.H....
, and 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 unadmitted homoerotic attraction between Gerald and Rupert. 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 Swiss AlpsSwiss Alps

The Swiss Alps are the central portion of the Alps mountain range that lies within Switzerland. ...
.

As with most of Lawrence's 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."

Plot Summary

Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen are two sisters living in the Midlands of England in the 1910s. Ursula is a teacher, Gudrun an artist. They meet two men who live nearby, Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich. The four become friends. Ursula and Birkin become involved and Gudrun eventually begins a love affair with Gerald.

All four are deeply concerned with questions of society, politics, and the relationship between men and women. At a party at Gerald's manor house, Gerald's sister, Diana, drowns. Gudrun becomes the teacher and mentor of his youngest sister. Soon Gerald's coal-mine-owning 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, becomes stormy. The four vacation in the Alps. Gudrun begins an intense friendship with Loerke, a physically puny but emotionally commanding artist. Gerald, enraged by Loerke, by Gudrun's abuse and by his own destructive nature, tries to murder Gudrun. In failing, he retreats back over the mountains and falls to his death in the snow.

Publication

Women in Love was originally published out of New York City in a limited run, available only to subscribers; this was due to the controversy caused by his previous work, The Rainbow.

Film adaptation

Screenwriter and producer Larry KramerLarry Kramer Summary

Larry Kramer, American dramatist, author and gay rights activist, was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut and was educated at Ya...
 and director Ken RussellKen Russell

Henry Kenneth Alfred Russell, known as Ken Russell, is a controversial English film director, particularly known for his fil...
 adapted the novel in the Academy AwardAcademy Awards

The Academy Awards, popularly known as the Oscars, are the most prominent film awards in the United States and most wa...
-winning 19691969 in film

The year 1969 in film involved some significant events. ...
 film Women in LoveWomen in Love (film)

Women in Love is a 1969 British film which tells the story of the relationships between men and women at the turn of the...
(for which Glenda JacksonGlenda Jackson

Glenda May Jackson, CBE, is a two-time Academy Award-winning British actress and politician, currently Labour Member of Parl...
 won for Best ActressAcademy Award for Best Actress

The Academy Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role is one of the awards given to people working in the m...
). It was one of the first theatrical movies to show male genitals, when Gerald Crich and Rupert Birkin wrestle in the nude in front of a roaring fireplace, in addition to several early skinny dipping shots and an explicit sequence of Birkin running naked in the forest after being hit on the head by his spurned former mistress, Hermione Roddice.

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. LeavisF. R. Leavis

    Frank Raymond Leavis CH was an influential British literary critic of the early-to-mid-twentieth century....
     (1955) D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (London, Chatto and Windus)
  • F. R. LeavisF. R. Leavis

    Frank Raymond Leavis CH was an influential British literary critic of the early-to-mid-twentieth century....
     (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), pp 7-26

External links