Women in Love (1920)

I loved being in the realm of this book, though I'm not sure what I think of the ending. ( )

Infuriating at every turn, but I'm still glad I read it. Was pretty sure this was all the Lawrence I'd ever have to read, but I was wrong. ( )

Lawrence wrote Women in Love as a sequel to The Rainbow, continuing on with the story of the Brangwen sisters Ursula and Gudrun. It picks up where he left off, with the sisters in their mid-twenties, and Gudrun asking Ursula if she truly does not want to get married and have children. Soon both are involved with men, Ursula with intellectual school inspector Rupert Birkin and Gudrun with an heir to a coal-mine, Gerald Crich.

Lawrence was a bitter man when he wrote the book, following censorship of The Rainbow and the deepening of the atrocities in WWI. Women in Love is darker and less optimistic as a result, and the alienated Birkin is widely held to represent Lawrence. The relationships of both couples are stormy to say the least, and as with Lawrence’s other books, sexual desire, subconscious forces, and the dark side of the relationship between men and women is on full display. He is also open about homosexual desire, this time between men, which apparently reflected his own apparent real-life romance with a farmer while writing the book.

At his best, Lawrence creates scenes which last in the reader’s memory. For me the best of these in Women in Love was when Ursula and Birkin are out for a drive and pull over to have a giant fight, pause briefly as a bicyclist pedals by, and then resume to have her throwing his gift of three rings into his face and walking off down the road. At his worst, Lawrence is too heavy in his prose and in his cynicism; a lighter touch here would have been more effective.

Quotes:
On brotherhood:
“Your democracy is an absolute lie – your brotherhood of man is a pure falsity, if you apply it further than the mathematical abstraction. We all drank milk first, we all eat bread and meat, we all want to ride in motor-cars – therein lies the beginning and the end of the brotherhood of man. But no equality.”

On childhood:
“Oh God, could one bear it, this past which was gone down the abyss? Could she bear, that it ever had been! She looked round this silent, upper world of snow and stars and powerful cold. There was another world, like views on a magic lantern: the Marsh, Cossethay, Ilkeston, lit up with a common, unreal light. There was a shadowy, unreal Ursula, a whole shadow-play of an unreal life. It was as unreal, and circumscribed, as a magic-lantern show. She wished the slides could all be broken. She wished it could be gone for ever, like a lantern-slide which is broken. She wanted to have no past. She wanted to have come down from the slopes of heaven to this place, with Birkin, not to have toiled out of the murk of her childhood and her upbringing, slowly, all soiled.”

On death:
“But the great, dark illimitable kingdom of death, there humanity was put to scorn. So much they could do upon earth, the multifarious little gods that they were. But the kingdom of death put them all to scorn, they dwindled into their true vulgar silliness in face of it.”

On knowledge:
“If I know about the flower, don’t I lose the flower and have only the knowledge? Aren’t we exchanging the substance for the shadow, aren’t we forfeiting life for this dead quantity of knowledge? And what does it mean to me, after all? What does all this knowledge mean to me? It means nothing.”

On love, and solitude:
“At the very last, one is alone, beyond the influence of love. There is a real impersonal me, that is beyond love, beyond any emotional relationship. So it is with you. But we want to delude ourselves that love is the root. It isn’t. It is only the branches. The root is beyond love, a naked kind of isolation, an isolated me, that does not meet and mingle, and never can.”

On life:
“…how known it all was, like a game with the figures set out, the same figures, the Queen of chess, the knights, the pawns, the same now as they were hundreds of years ago, the same figures moving round in one of the innumerable permutations that make up the game. But the game is known, its going on is like a madness, it is so exhausted.”

And this one, which I love:
“She thought of the Marsh, the old, intimate farm-life at Cossethay. My God, how far was she projected from her childhood, how far was she still to go! In one life-time one travelled through aeons. The great chasm of memory, from her childhood in the intimate country surroundings of Cossethay and the Marsh Farm – she remembered the servant Tillly, who used to give her bread and butter sprinkled with brown sugar, in the old living-room where the grandfather clock had two pink roses in a basked painted above the figures on the face – and now, when she was travelling into the unknown with Birkin, an utter stranger – was so great, that it seemed she had no identity, that the child she had been, playing in Cossethay churchyard, was a little creature of history, not really herself.”

On rambling:
“At moments it seemed to him he did not care a straw whether Ursula or Hermione or anybody else existed or did not exist. Why bother! Why strive for a coherent, satisfied life? Why not drift on in a series of accidents – like a picaresque novel? Why not? Why bother about human relationships? Why take them seriously – male or female? Why form any serious questions at all? Why not be casual, drifting along, taking all for what it was worth?” ( )

After reading several of Lawrence’s books, I have come to the conclusion that what keeps D. H. Lawrence in the Modern Library Top 100 list is his inexhaustible capacity to describe the human psyche. Perhaps not your psyche or mine, but the psyche of his eclectic characters. However, unfortunately I found it very difficult to relate to most of them.

The two young Brangwen women, Ursula and Gudrun, share many characteristics. They both crave independence, loathe social decorum, have a burning desire to find true love, and have an adventurous spirit. Yes, they wanted it all! Today that might be possible, but around the year 1915, it would have taken rare circumstances to acquire the prized combination of eternal love and independence.

They pick two very different men. Ursula (after several failed attempts at love in The Rainbow) falls for an anti-social cynical nihilist who professes to hate sex, love, passion, marriage, children, and all forms of domestic life (page 186). I never did figure out exactly what the attraction of Birkin was to Ursula, but Lawrence must have known because he claimed this character, Rupert Birkin, was in essence himself, and Ursula resembled Lawrence’s wife Frieda.

Gudrun, an artist, an idealist, and as skittish as an untamed animal, pairs up with a wealthy, successful, handsome, and aristocratic business manager, Gerald Crich. On the surface he is totally in control - the ideal man. But under the surface he suffers a deep dark feeling of emptiness and sense of impending doom. Again, an unlikely match, but Lawrence makes an effort to force his characters to behave as the plot demands.

While Lawrence is leading his characters on a twisted labyrinth of human emotions, drama and the illusive search for happiness, he is with very little subtlety sermonizing his personal philosophy- extreme right wing autocratic politics and ultra liberal sexual ideals. His cynical attitude about love and traditional marriage oozes from every page. And a common thread from three of his highly praised novels is his disdain for women; most of his female characters seem to be selfish, vain, and manipulative. I almost get the feeling that the title "Women in Love" was flagrantly intended to be a mocking slap in the face, essentially stated in sarcastic contempt.

Perhaps Lawrence may have deserved the Modern Library recognition for "Women in Love" at one time, but to say today that it is one of the best novels ever written in the English language is just a damned shame... in spite of his sweeping sardonic language.
Overrated and extremely disappointing. ( )

I recently read The Rainbow, and was curious to see how the Bronwen line continued. This book focusses on sisters Gudrun and Ursula and the men they fall for.

Gudrun becomes involved with Gerald, but their differences are wounding, she is an artist, wheareas Gerald owns a mine. Tragic circumstances draw them closer together, with Lawrence exploring their relationship in stark contrast to that of Gudrun's sister with Gerald's friend, Rupert. Ursula and Rupert seem more suited, but their past and future could derail them.

As with The Rainbow, the book deals with a changing world and a new generation trying to break out of the constraints of the previous. There is also the struggle between art and science, especially shown in the relationship between Gudrun and Gerald.

I took a while over this, it didn't seem to grab me as much as The Rainbow at first. The tone has moved on from the first book, with the much rawer feelings. I can see how the book would have been controversial, but almost a century later, it seems rather tame, though still thought-provoking. ( )