Women in Love | D. H. Lawrence | Women in Love: A Classic Novel by the first Freudian novelists...

Women in Love | D. H. Lawrence | classic study of relationships

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Women in Love

	Women in Love D. H. Lawrence Dover Publications, 2003 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 49 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A sequel to Lawrence's earlier The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love continues the story of the Brangwen sisters in the coal-mining town of Beldover. Based in part on Lawrence's own stormy marriage to German aristocrat Frieda von Richthofen, the tale is charged with intense feelings and psychological insights.

Women in Love: A Classic Novel by the first Freudian novelists who plumbed the human id

DH Lawrence was born in the coaltown of Eastwood located eight miles from Nottingham, England in the Midlands region of Great Britain. His father was feckless; his mother worshipped young Bert who was sensitive, reserved and bookish.
Lawrence grew up to leave this repressed environment to wander the world with his German wife Frieda. He remembered how the miners would enter the coalmines with clean clothes emerging hours later covered with black coal dust. Like those miners, Lawrence would also go "underground" exploring those human emotions we keep repressed. His themes were communication between the sexes concluding that we are basically alone in a godless universe. Plot and story are minimal in a Lawrence novel. The iconoclastic novelist was more interested in examining our motivations through stream of consciousness and dialgoue between his complex characters. These themes are evinced in "Women in Love" his brilliant sequel to "The Rainbow" dealingwith several generations of the Brangwen family.
The main characters in this 1920 novel are:
1. Ursula Brangwen: The plainer of the two Brangwen daughters. Ursula is a 26 year old teacher in a Midlands school. Her life is mundane. She is an intellectual who falls in love with the mecurial Rupert Birken.
Ursula is said to be a fictional recreation of Lawrence's wife Frieda.
She is fiercly independent but craves the warmth of a sexual/spiritual relationship with a man.
2. Gudrun Brangwen is the artistic sister of Brangwen. She is an art teacher in a local school. Gudrun has studied and worked abroad as a sculptress. She is artsy,loving life. Gudrun enters into a tempestuous affair with the owner of the town mining company. Her affair with the aristocratic Gerald Brangwen will end in tragedy. Gudrun wears bright clothing and is more outgoing than her sister Ursula. She too is independent wanting to go beyond sex or domestic life with a life partner.
She may have been based on Lawrence's New Zealand writer friend Katherine Mansfield.
3. Rupert Birkin is the fictionalized portrait of the author. Birkin is a school inspector who has a desire to create a new world free of the harsh Victorian conventional society he despises. His longtime lover is the wealthy Hermione. Birkin jilts the superficial Hermione for the enchanting and engimatic Ursula. As the novel ends he and Ursula are married, The Birkins leave England for a life of wandering much as did Frieda and D.H. Lawrence. Birkin, as well as Lawrence, hated modern industrialized society which made men and women into automatic machines in a souless society.
4. Gerald Crich is the owner of a large mining company in the area. Gerald can be very cruel as when he forces a horse he is astride to sit still while a train (the symbol of industrialized life) roars by to the dismay of the frightened creature. Crich is also seen strangling a rabbit. He has been a playboy with a mistress named Pussums. Crich has a torrid affair with Gudrud which ends in a tragedy. Crich is a handsome man who wants power in busines and his affair with Gudrud. He attempts to strangle her and control her every move. Crich is the least sympathetic and most tortured of the four major characters.
D.H. Lawrence's prose in this major novel is lyrical, poetic and detailed in its description of moods, nature and the emotions inherent to love. Lawrence knew the human psyche is a mine which needed exploration by a perceptive novelist. Lawrence is still worthy reading all of these years after the Brangwen girls story was first spun into gold by a literary giant.

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classic study of relationships

D.H. Lawrence is not for the faint hearted, or anyone with a short attention span. Women in Love would perhaps be better title Women and Men in Love, as Gerald and Birkin play equally important roles as Gudren and Ursula.

Those looking for mere titillation will be sorely disappointed, however, as the sexual charged moments are primarily portrayed through internal thoughts and emotions - indeed, by today's standards this would be a PG-13 at the most, although the inferences are certainly more adult than that.

The exploration of relationships portrayed here shows the beginning of women's liberation, as well as a philosophy accepting of non-heterosexual love - although again these are through thoughts and emotions, and occassionally conversations, with nothing more blatant than a wrestling scene actually happening.

In the end this seemed to be more about failing to achieve harmonious relations than succeeding at it - though in the end one couple remains and one is apart, I am not sure but that it could have been as easily reversed as to which was which.

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The charming, hilarious, and throught provoking story of two sisters.

This book is beautifully written. You could randomly pick almost any paragraph and read it and close the book and think to your self "wow, that was beautiful." It tells the story of sisters Gudrun and Brangwen, two young women in England who stand apart from the crowd and struggle with their quirky independence in a classist society.

Of course it isn't a gripper or a page turner. It took me over a year to finish reading this book. That's not to say it's not good-- on the contrary I say it's a testament to how good it is that I ever finished it. How many times have you put a book down for months and then returned to pick it up where you left off? I can think of one other book I did that with, but I did it several times with Women in Love.

It's slow, and in the beginning I couldn't really keep all the characters straight. But it's beautiful and it's hilarious! The langauge of the day, comsbined with the melodrama of Gudrun and Bragwen as they discuss the banal horror of spending the rest of their life with any of the men they know, is both charming and laugh-out-loud funny.

The book works as a period piece; you can see the structured class system of the England of the day nad the sisters who simply don't fit in with anyone.

The book also works as a philosophical piece; at times it reminds me of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. The chapters dedicated to the coal mines and the machine-like endeavors of the men who runs them must have inspired Ayn Rand's work.

This book is deifnitely worth reading, but perhaps best along side another book (or 10).

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Still shocking as a work of literature

Well-formatted for the Kindle, with an easy-to-navigate table of contents. The novel itself is striking -- "right between the eyes." Passion has rarely felt so naked, and yet so much of the passion in _Women in Love_ is the passion of intellectual debate. The characters are desperate to know, *finally*, who they are, and flummoxed by their need for such explanation.

Tough at first, But worth the work

First off, I LOVED the Rainbow, the prequel to this book. I was very excited to get into this book and see how the characters developed further. In the beginning I felt the same interest as I did with the Rainbow, but as many others have stated, somewhere in the middle the reading got a litte tedious. Birkin was such a preachy kind of character, constantly spouting off stuff without ever convincingly proving he believed it himself! Luckily, Ursula seemed to tone that down in him. I did have a point where I debated finishing the book but I figured I had already committed to seeing how things worked out with everyone. Man, what a payoff at the end! BIG twist ending!!! Maybe that was Lawrence's way of rewarding his readers for allowing him his theological or philosophical rants and loving him anyway. He threw in the big exciting finish. Well, I say if you like Lawrence and you liked the Rainbow, this one might feel like a little more work but give it a chance and you're sure to get a satisfying conclusion to these characters.

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