Women in Love
Author | D. H. Lawrence |
---|---|
Language | English |
Genre | Novel |
Publisher | Thomas Seltzer |
Publication date | 1920 |
Media type | Print (hardcover and paperback) |
Pages | 536 (first edition hardcover) |
Preceded by | The Rainbow |
Followed by | The Lost Girl |
Women in Love (1920) is a novel by English author D. H. Lawrence. It is a sequel to his earlier novel The Rainbow (1915) 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 Brangwen 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
Synopsis
Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen are sisters living in
All four are deeply concerned with questions of society, politics, and the relationship between men and women. At a party at Shortlands, the Crich family's country manor home, Gerald's sister Diana drowns. Gudrun becomes the teacher and mentor of Gerald's youngest sister. Soon, Gerald's coal-mine-owning father dies as well, after a long illness. After the funeral, Gerald goes to Gudrun's house and spends the night with her while her parents sleep in another room.
Birkin asks Ursula to marry him, and she agrees. Gerald and Gudrun's relationship, however, becomes stormy.
The two couples take a holiday together in the Austrian Alps. Gudrun begins an intense friendship with Loerke, a physically puny but emotionally commanding artist from Dresden. Gerald, enraged by Loerke and most of all by Gudrun's verbal abuse and rejection of his manhood, and driven by his own internal violence, tries to strangle Gudrun. He suddenly becomes disgusted with his actions and lets her go. He leaves Gudrun and Loerke to climb the mountain, eventually slipping into a snowy valley where he falls asleep and freezes to death.
The impact of Gerald's death upon Birkin is profound. The novel ends a few weeks after Gerald's death with Birkin trying to explain to Ursula that, although he needed no other woman than Ursula, he valued a relationship with Gerald that is gone forever.
Publication history
After years of misunderstandings, accusations of duplicity, and hurried letters, Thomas Seltzer finally published the first edition of Women in Love in New York City, on 9 November 1920. This had come after three drawn out years of delays and revisions.[3] This first limited edition (1,250 books) was available only to subscribers, due to the controversy caused by Lawrence's previous work, The Rainbow (1915).
Originally, the two books were written as parts of a single novel, but the publisher had decided to publish them separately and in rapid succession. The first book's treatment of sexuality was frank for the mores of the time, and, after an
Reception
As with most of Lawrence's works, Women in Love's sexual subject matter caused controversy. For example, W. Charles Pilley, an early reviewer wrote of it in
In contrast, the critic
Adaptations
Film adaptation
Screenwriter and producer
Radio and television adaptations
William Ivory combined Women in Love with Lawrence's earlier novel,
BBC Radio 4 broadcast Women in Love as a four-part serial in 1996, dramatised by Elaine Feinstein and starring Stella Gonet as Gudrun, Clare Holman as Ursula, Douglas Hodge as Gerald and Nicholas Farrell as Rupert. It has been repeated several times on BBC Radio 4 Extra, most recently in July 2022.[11]
Editions
- Lawrence, D.H. (1920). Women in Love (Privately Printed ed.). New York: Thomas Seltzer.
- Lawrence, D.H. (1921). Women in Love (Trade ed.). London: Martin Secker.
- Lawrence, D.H. (1982). Ross, Charles L. (ed.). Women in Love. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin.
- Lawrence, D.H.; Farmer, David; Vasey, Lindeth; Worthen, John (1987). Women in Love (The Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D. H. Lawrence ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Lawrence, D.H.; Farmer, David; Vasey, Lindeth; Worthen, John; Kinkead-Weekes, M. (1995). Women in Love. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-062161-7.
- Lawrence, D.H. (1998). Bradshaw, David (ed.). Women in Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-37326-5.
- Lawrence, D.H. (1998) [1916–17]. Worthen, John & Vasey, Lindeth (eds.). The First Women in Love (ISBN 0-521-37326-3. (This edition displays significant differences from the final published version.)
- Lawrence, D.H. "Prologue". The Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D. H. Lawrence. Cambridge University Press. pp. 489–506. (This discarded section of an early version of the novel is set four years after Gerald and Birkin have returned from a skiing holiday, and was published as an appendix to The Cambridge Edition.)
- Lawrence, D.H. (2007). The First Women in Love. Oneworld Classics. ISBN 978-1-84749-005-6.
Literary criticism
- Beynon, Richard, ed. (1997). D. H. Lawrence: The Rainbow and Women in Love. Cambridge: Icon Books.
- Black, Michael (2001). Lawrence's England: The Major Fiction, 1913 – 1920. Palgrave-MacMillan.
- Chaudhuri, A.; Paulin, Tim (2003). D.H Lawrence and 'Difference': Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present (UEA Repository (Book) ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-926052-4.
- Delany, Paul (1978). D. H. Lawrence's Nightmare: The Writer and his Circle in the Years of the Great War. Hassocks: Harvester Press.
- Leavis, F.R. (1955). D. H. Lawrence: Novelist. London: Chatto and Windus.
- Leavis, F.R. (1976). Thought, Words and Creativity: Art and Thought in D. H. Lawrence. London: Chatto and Windus. ISBN 978-0-7011-2182-2.
- Oates, Joyce Carol (Spring 1978). "Lawrence's Götterdämmerung: The Apocalyptic Vision of Women in Love". Critical Inquiry.
- Ross, Charles L. (1991). Women in Love: A Novel of Mythic Realism. Boston, MA: Twayne.
- Worthen, John (1989). "The Restoration of Women in Love". In Preston, Peter; Hoare, Peter (eds.). D. H. Lawrence in the Modern World. London: Macmillan. pp. 7–26.
References
- ^ Kaplan, Sydney Janet (2010). Circulating Genius: John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
- ^ "D.H. Lawrence". katherinemansfield.net. Archived from the original on 19 June 2010. Retrieved 13 July 2016.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) - ^ Ross, Charles L. (1979). The Proofs: Censorship and Revision. The Composition of The Rainbow and Women in Love: A History. UP of Virginia. pp. 124–25.
- ^ W. Charles Pilley (17 September 1921). "Review of Women in Love". John Bull.
- ^ Ross, Charles L. (1979). The Proofs: Censorship and Revision. The Composition of The Rainbow and Women in Love: A History. UP of Virginia. p. 124.
- ^ de Beauvoir, Simone. La Deuxième Sexe. p. 229.
- ^ Paglia, Camille (1994). Vamps and Tramps: New Essays. Penguin Books. pp. 329, 336.
- ^ Bloom, Harold (1994). The Western Canon. Riverhead Books. p. 522.
- ^ Spalding, Francis (1997). Duncan Grant: A Biography. pp. 169–170. "Lawrence's views (i.e., warning David Garnett against homosexual tendencies), as Quentin Bell was the first to suggest and S. P. Rosenbaum has argued conclusively, were stirred by a dread of his own homosexual susceptibilities, which are revealed in his writings, notably the cancelled prologue to Women in Love".
- ^ 100 Best Novels, Modern Library
- ^ "DH Lawrence - Women in Love, Springtime". BBC. 27 October 1996. Retrieved 3 November 2018.
External links
- Women in Love at Project Gutenberg
- Women in Love public domain audiobook at LibriVox
- Plot Summary and Analysis at Modernism Lab Essays