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Brangwen Family #2
Women in Love
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HOWARD JACOBSON
Women in Love begins one blossoming spring day in England and ends with a terrible catastrophe in the snow of the Alps. Ursula and Gudrun are very different sisters who become entangled with two friends, Rupert and Gerald, who live in their hometown. The bonds between the couples quickly become intense and passionate but whether this passion is creative or destructive is unclear.In this astonishing novel, widely considered to be D.H. Lawrence's best work, he explores what it means to be human in an age of conflict and confusion.
Women in Love begins one blossoming spring day in England and ends with a terrible catastrophe in the snow of the Alps. Ursula and Gudrun are very different sisters who become entangled with two friends, Rupert and Gerald, who live in their hometown. The bonds between the couples quickly become intense and passionate but whether this passion is creative or destructive is unclear.In this astonishing novel, widely considered to be D.H. Lawrence's best work, he explores what it means to be human in an age of conflict and confusion.
496 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1920
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About the author
D.H. Lawrence
2,085 books4,156 followersDavid Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English writer of the 20th century, whose prolific and diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism, and personal letters. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, human sexuality and instinct.
Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage." At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel. He is now generally valued as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.H._Law...
Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage." At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel. He is now generally valued as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.H._Law...
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September 20, 2024
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Possibly it’s not so surprising when a more-than-slightly fanatical working-class autodidact rewrites the Old Testament in order to put back all the sex that the original author left out. That it then astonishes, infuriates, bores and nauseates in jarring alternating spasms is completely expected. That Ken Russell made a movie of it was likewise predictable; but that his movie was a model of good taste was a great disappointment – come on, Ken, where were the tits and bums and the giant plastic phalluses and the naked nuns? DH Lawrence was a unique novelist. If he’d never existed we really wouldn’t have had to invent him. I’m thinking that now he’s subsided entirely into Eng Lit courses where he lurks like a half submerged lamprey, luring the innocent with his new-aginess and biting their soft parts with his fascism. You should probably read one DHL novel and this is probably the one. Certainly not The Rainbow! Are you kidding?
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Possibly it’s not so surprising when a more-than-slightly fanatical working-class autodidact rewrites the Old Testament in order to put back all the sex that the original author left out. That it then astonishes, infuriates, bores and nauseates in jarring alternating spasms is completely expected. That Ken Russell made a movie of it was likewise predictable; but that his movie was a model of good taste was a great disappointment – come on, Ken, where were the tits and bums and the giant plastic phalluses and the naked nuns? DH Lawrence was a unique novelist. If he’d never existed we really wouldn’t have had to invent him. I’m thinking that now he’s subsided entirely into Eng Lit courses where he lurks like a half submerged lamprey, luring the innocent with his new-aginess and biting their soft parts with his fascism. You should probably read one DHL novel and this is probably the one. Certainly not The Rainbow! Are you kidding?
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September 4, 2022
Novels by D.H. Lawrence possess the absolutely unique psychological climate and Women in Love is definitely one of his groundbreaking masterpieces.
Women in Love and Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley constitute an exhaustive portrayal of the tempestuous era – at least on the intellectual plane.
Human being is a complex combination of natural instincts, emotions, consciousness, reason and acquired knowledge so one's main task is to keep all these ingredients in harmony.
I detest what I am, outwardly. I loathe myself as a human being. Humanity is a huge aggregate lie, and a huge lie is less than a small truth. Humanity is less, far less than the individual, because the individual may sometimes be capable of truth, and humanity is a tree of lies.
Women in Love and Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley constitute an exhaustive portrayal of the tempestuous era – at least on the intellectual plane.
She knew, with the perfect cynicism of cruel youth, that to rise in the world meant to have one outside show instead of another, the advance was like having a spurious half-crown instead of a spurious penny.
Human being is a complex combination of natural instincts, emotions, consciousness, reason and acquired knowledge so one's main task is to keep all these ingredients in harmony.
January 25, 2016
I can review this only in relation to its precursor, The Rainbow (review here).
My Journey
I went straight from the flames of floral, rural passion in The Rainbow, to this often brittle discussion of the abstract, set in a more mechanical age, where animals - metaphorical and literal - are key, and death’s shadow hovers hungrily. It's beautiful, entrancing, but also opaque and frustrating.
I travelled with Ursula from her teenage years in the balmy countryside, where people act on their desires, to her earnest twenties: first in a grimy northern mining town, then in the frigid, glistening ice of the Tyrollean Alps. It’s not such a linear narrative as The Rainbow; more a series of episodes (chapter lengths vary hugely - between 3 and 50 pages).
It seems to ask:
• Must the rainbow hues leach out of life (Gudrun’s ever-colourful stocking notwithstanding)?
• Must passion end in death (not necessarily the little one)?
This is a novel of ideas, but I often felt unequal to them. There was so much to wrestle with, I was stripped bare by the dizzying mix of themes, language, passions, lives - and deaths. I had to submit to the experience, though in a rather different way to The Rainbow.
My status on finishing was a single word, “Eviscerated”. Ruminating further, a conversation towards the end is pertinent. One character tells their partner “It’s over”, and the reply is “But it isn’t finished… There must be finality”. In writing this, I think I have found finality. (I will return to Lawrence, though!)
Lawrence wrote this after Wilde, during a war (WW1), and before Waugh. It has the self-consciously clever dialogue of the first and last, in the context of warring relationships: all conflicted between love and hate, artifice and instinct, life and death - murderous desire, even.
The intellectual sparring matches have a theatrical quality, as if the protagonists are speaking for posterity. Then the audience departs, the mask falls, and naturalistic passion, action and imagery blossoms, such as the blissful release for Birkin, rolling naked in the primroses. “He wanted to touch them all… to saturate himself with the touch of them all… It was such a fine, cool, subtle touch all over him, he seemed to saturate himself with their contact.” The rarer physical assaults (lapis, wrestling, and in the snow) have greater visceral power as a result.
It seems to say that whatever persona we try to present, however much we try to assert our will (a recurring theme), we’re all animals underneath.
Animals
What a carnal carnival of animals this is. People are likened to, amongst other things: smiling wolf, hermit crab, pouncing hound, octopus, restless bird, “slithering sea-lion”, “funeral bird, feeding on the miseries of the people”, small cat, dog, cockerel, bird of paradise, rabbit, wild animal, shrew, stallion, “hopping flea”, fish, weasel, voice like a gull, water-spiders, horses, python, “eyes as keen as a hawk”, water-rat, “elegant beetle”, seal, “eyes blazed like a tiger’s”, bat, amphibious beast, eagle, “humble maggot”, wearing “startling colours, like a macaw”, eels, various insects, and “strange moths”!
Gudrun’s art typically features animals and birds, her friendship with Loerke is kindled by a picture of his statue of a naked girl on a horse, and there are actual animals at key points in the story:
• Ursula and Gudrun watch Gerald violently beat his horse to submission, when it is terrified by a train.
• Gudrun confronts an alarming herd of cattle, but finds inner strength (and euythmics).
• A chapter is devoted to Birkin’s cat - given to him by Hermione, and still part of the power she wields over him.
• Another chapter is about a vicious pet rabbit (called Bismarck) that draws blood from Gerald and Gudrun.
Plot
There are four main characters: Ursula Brangwen and her sister Gudrun, only a year younger. They are very close, but it’s also fiery relationship. Both teach at the grammar school: Ursula as a general teacher and Gudrun just art (she is really a sculptor, has travelled abroad, and lived in Bohemian London).
They become involved with Rupert Birkin, a school inspector, and Gerald Crich, eldest son of a wealthy colliery owner. Birkin and Gerald have a deep and conflicted relationship with each other. Women in Love - or Men in Love? The Crich family is large, the mother mentally unstable, and the father physically declining. We know nothing of Birkin’s family.
The four go to Innsbruck, where Loerke, a German artist, is added to the increasingly toxic mix of relationships.
Ursula and Gudrun are fiercely independent women, in thought and deed, including their relationships. They are not afraid of what other people think. The problem is that that often can’t decide what they think and so cannot decide what they should do and not do: “His licentiousness was repulsively attractive” and “she was far, far from being at ease with him”. And yet…
The men’s attitudes to women are not as positive or equal. At times, they’re exploitative, at other times, women are considered second best, albeit decorative and convenient.
Towards the end, I feared Lawrence was going to quash all that and have them either settle for conventionality, or suffer for not doing so...
Recurring Themes
Is it better to look at things as a whole, or take them to pieces? “I really don’t want to be forced into all this criticism and analysis of life. I really do want to see things in their entirety, with their beauty left in them.” In this review, I've opted for the former.
It is set in age of change: mechanisation, social mobility, equality, and philanthropy. To the father, “in Christ, he was one with his workmen”, but to his son, they “were his instruments” and “What mattered was the great social productive machine.”
Primarily though, this is about relationships:
The types of love, relationships, and marriage considered and entered into is very broad-minded for the time, such as “a mutual union in separateness”. It also explores how/if sex and friendship relate. “She had had lovers, she had known passion. But this was neither love nor passion. It was the daughters of men coming back to the sons of God, the strange inhuman sons of God.”
Homosexuality, bisexuality, and non-monogamous relationships suffuse the story. It’s not just the famous naked wrestling: is far less ambiguous than I expected. “I believe in the additional perfect relationship between a man and a man.” Later, "You are enough for me, as far as a woman is concerned. You are all women to me. But I wanted a man friend, as eternal as you and I are eternal... to make it complete, really happy, I wanted eternal union with a man too: another kind of love."
Conflict and duality are present in all the main relationships (love, hate, and whose will will triumph), violence and coercion too. “Always it was this eternal see-saw, one destroyed that the other might exist, one ratified because the other was nulled.” Ultimately, “One of them must triumph over the other”.
There is no escape, “It was a fight to the death between them - or to new life: though in what the conflict lay, no one could say” and "She felt an approaching release, a new fountain of life rising up in her... Yet underneath was death itself."
Quotes
• “A strange enmity… very near to love.”
• “I hate subtleties. I always think they are a sign of weakness.”
• “The lake lay all grey and visionary, stretching into the moist, translucent vista of trees and meadow.”
• “It was rather delicious to feel her drawing his self-revelation from him… And her dark eyes seemed to be looking through into his naked organism… She wanted the secret of him, the experience of his male being.”
• “She seemed to become soft, subtly to infuse herself into his bones, as if she were passing into him in a black, electric flow. Her being suffused into his veins like a magnetic darkness.”
• “They always kept a gap, a distance between them, they wanted always to be free of each other. Yet there was a curious heart-straining towards each other.”
• “She seemed to grip the hours by the throat, to force her life from them.”
• “It was a sunny, soft morning in early summer, when life ran in the world subtly like a reminiscence.”
• “The heavy gold glamour of approaching sunset lay over all the colliery district, and the ugliness overlaid with beauty was like a narcotic to the senses… over all the amorphous squalor a kind of magic was cast.”
• “The broad dialect was curiously caressing to the blood… In their voices she could hear the voluptuous resonance of darkness, the strong, dangerous underworld, mindless, inhuman. They sounded also like strange machines heavily oiled.”
• “Why should you always be doing?” Often, I wanted the characters to do more doing (and less talking).
• “He saw her face strangely enkindled, as if suffused from within by a powerful sweet fire. His soul was arrested in wonder. She was enkindled in her own living fire. Arrested in wonder and in pure, perfect attraction, he moved towards her.”
• “On the water, lanterns were coming alight, faint ghosts of warm flame floating in the pallor of the first twilight. The earth was spread with darkness, like lacquer, overhead was a pale sky, all primrose, and the lake was pale as milk in one part. Away at the landing stage, tiniest points of coloured rays were stringing themselves in the dusk... All round, shadow was gathering from the trees.”
• Pain “gradually absorbed hi life. Gradually it drew away all his potentiality, it bled him into the dark, it weaned him of life.”
• “The men were satisfied to belong to the great and wonderful machine, even whilst it destroyed them...Their hearts died within them, but their souls were satisfied.”
• “I want you to drop your assertive will… I want you to trust yourself so implicitly, that you can let yourself go.”
• “He kissed her softly… like dew falling.”
• “Her father was not a coherent human being, he was a roomful of old echoes.”
• Wrestling, “They became accustomed to each other, to each other's rhythm, they got a kind of mutual physical understanding...as if they would break into a oneness… working into a tighter closer oneness of struggle, with a strange, octopus-like knotting and flashing of limbs in the subdued light of the room… the strange sound of flesh escaping under flesh. Often, in the white interlaced knot of violent living being that swayed silently, there was no head to be seen, only the swift, tight limbs, the solid white backs, the physical junction of two bodies clinched into oneness… The earth seemed to tilt and sway, and a complete darkness was coming over his mind. He did not know what happened.”
• “The talk went on like a rattle of small artillery... the continual splatter of verbal jest, designed to give a tone of flippancy to a stream of conversation that was all critical and general, a canal of conversation rather than a stream. The attitude was mental and very wearying.”
• H's face: “There was something of the stupidity and the unenlightened self-esteem of a horse in it.”
• “Her pity for him was as cold as stone, its deepest motive was hate of him, and fear of his power over her, which she must always counterfoil.”
• “She was like a flower just opened in the rain, the heart of the blossom just newly visible, seeming to emit a warmth of retained sunshine.”
• “And now, behold, from the smitten rock of the man's body, from the strange marvellous flanks and thighs, deeper, further in mystery than the phallic source, came the floods of ineffable darkness and ineffable riches.”
• “She had her desire of him, she touched, she received the maximum of unspeakable communication in touch, dark, subtle, positively silent, a magnificent gift and give again, a perfect acceptance and yielding, a mystery... the immemorial magnificence of mystic, palpable, real otherness.”
• “He seemed to be gathering her into himself, her warmth, her softness, her adorable weight, drinking in the suffusion of her physical being, avidly. He lifted her, and seemed to pour her into himself, like wine into a cup… So she relaxed, and seemed to melt, to flow into him, as if she were some infinitely warm and precious suffusion filling into his veins, like an intoxicant.
• “She reached up, like Eve reaching to the apples on the tree of knowledge… touching his face with her infinitely delicate, encroaching wondering fingers… Her soul thrilled with complete knowledge. This was the glistening, forbidden apple, this face of a man.”
• “To know him, to gather him in by touch... She wanted to touch him and touch him and touch him.”
• “It was a rather stiff, sad meeting, more like a verification of separateness than a reunion.”
• “There they sat down, folded together, folded round with the same rug, creeping in nearer and ever nearer to one another, till it seemed they had crept right into each other, and become one substance.”
• “His heart went up like a flame of ice.”
• They “found themselves in a vague, unsubstantial outdoors of dim snow and ghosts of an upper-world, that made strange shadows before the stars... It seemed conscious, malevolent, purposive in its intense murderous coldness.”
• “The first days passed in an ecstasy of physical motion, sleighing, skiing, skating, moving in an intensity of speed and white light that surpassed life itself, and carried the souls of the human beings beyond into an inhuman abstraction of velocity and weight and eternal, frozen snow.”
• “It was a fight to the death, she knew it now.”
• “Either the heart would break, or cease to care.”
Moony
One of my favourite passages, from the chapter titled "Moony":
Throwing stones at the moon’s reflection: “Darts of bright light shot asunder, darkness swept over the centre. There was no moon, only a battlefield of broken lights and shadows, running close together. Shadows, dark and heavy, struck again and again across the place where the heart of the moon had been, obliterating it altogether. The white fragments pulsed up and down, and could not find where to go, apart and brilliant on the water like the petals of a rose that a wind has blown far and wide… He saw the moon regathering itself insidiously, saw the heart of the rose intertwining vigorously and blindly, calling back the scattered fragments, winning home the fragments, in a pulse and in effort of return.” Throw another stone: “Flakes of light appeared here and there, glittering tormented among the shadows, far off, in strange places; among the dripping shadow of the willow on the island.”
Amusing Bafflement
• Chapter VI has three references to “inchoate eyes”, whatever that means.
• “He rocked on the water perfectly, like the rocking of phosphorescence.” Yes, he’s in a boat, but even so…
• “Her soul was destroyed with the exquisite shock of his invisible fluid lightning… Ah much, much, many days harvesting for her large, yet perfectly subtle and intelligent hands upon the field of his living, radio-active body.” Ugh - or LOL?
*Picture sources
Carpet of primroses: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/...
Brinsley colliery: http://www.healeyhero.co.uk/rescue/ea...
Alpine peak: http://il1.picdn.net/shutterstock/vid...
October 11, 2015
Probably it’s always going to be a mistake to reread a book you loved in your youth. I haven’t read Lawrence for a long time. I believed I had his triumphs and failures pretty clear in my mind. Sons and Lovers, the early stories, The Rainbow and Women in Love all masterpieces; everything that followed going from bad to worse. So it was a shock to discover that Women in Love probably belongs in the latter category. There are, of course, flashes of his unique genius but they are few and far between. As is frequently the case in his later novels Lawrence is here on his soapbox, sermonising and ranting. His fabulous electric insights into the beauty of the natural world are virtually absent.
There’s something of the angry teenager in Lawrence – he’s always on some protest march and his target is always the established order. The four central characters in WIL, with the exception perhaps of Ursula, come across as outgrown children with relentlessly outsized emotions. Every moment is a dark night of the soul or an epiphany. They simply do not do ordinary emotion. He also has the teenage urgency to exalt his own love over everyone else’s, as if what he knows as love is mysteriously denied to all us mere mortals. “How can I say “I love you” when I have ceased to be: we are both caught up and transcended into a new oneness where everything is silent, because there is nothing to answer, all is perfect and at one.” We don’t though feel this at all. They are just empty words. This is a problem in this novel – the characters do not effectively dramatise Lawrence’s lofty ideas. The novel is all caught up in the subjectivity of its author. Lawrence’s mouthpiece in this novel is Birkin. In every novel he wrote he had to have a mouthpiece and usually this is the character you most feel like slapping in the face.
On the positive side Lawrence can be brilliant at understanding women. Forget the overblown kitsch of the wrestling scene the best moment in this novel is when Ursula gives vent to her rage at Birkin. It’s a brilliant depiction of primeval female fury directed at the cajoling bullying instinct of the male.
I noticed Lawrence has a habit of placing opposition in his character’s feelings. This kind of thing - She was happy and yet she was resentful. He was curious and yet he was bored. They were resigned and yet they were hopeful. He does this all the time. I suppose it does have a place as this novel is about will – the wrestling of one will against another, whether it’s an individual or society as a whole. Lawrence is trying to forge a new concept of will. Ultimately the eternal snow-capped mountains will impede this dawning of a new day in human volition.
One of the reasons I loved this novel in my youth was that I idolised Katherine Mansfield and Lawrence uses her for the character of Gudrun and her husband John Middleton Murray for Gerald.
“Lawrence met Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry when they wrote to him in 1913 to ask for a story to publish in Rhythm - the magazine they edited together in London. When the Lawrences came to England the two couples met and established an immediate rapport. Katherine and John were witnesses at their marriage and Frieda gave Katherine her old wedding ring, which Katherine wore for the rest of her life. Katherine and Frieda never became real friends - Katherine’s affinity was always with Lawrence. There was tension in the relationship because Lawrence was deeply attracted to John, wanting to establish a ‘blood brother bond’ with him. John was also attracted to Frieda, with whom he had an affair after Katherine died. The two couples lived close to each other, first in Berkshire in 1914 and then in Zennor Cornwall in 1915. There were innumerable quarrels and the friendship was broken off several times. Lawrence once wrote to Katherine - a fellow consumptive; ‘You are a loathsome reptile stewing in your consumption. I hope you will die.’ Katherine understood Lawrence and even forgave him, writing in her Journal that ‘Lawrence and I are unthinkably alike.”
So, Women in Love: heavy on verbiage, rubbled with repetitive pseudo philosophy, burdened with three of most unlikeable characters you’re likely to meet in a novel all year and yet here and there dazzlingly brilliant as Lawrence was when he stepped down from his tiresome soapbox.
There’s something of the angry teenager in Lawrence – he’s always on some protest march and his target is always the established order. The four central characters in WIL, with the exception perhaps of Ursula, come across as outgrown children with relentlessly outsized emotions. Every moment is a dark night of the soul or an epiphany. They simply do not do ordinary emotion. He also has the teenage urgency to exalt his own love over everyone else’s, as if what he knows as love is mysteriously denied to all us mere mortals. “How can I say “I love you” when I have ceased to be: we are both caught up and transcended into a new oneness where everything is silent, because there is nothing to answer, all is perfect and at one.” We don’t though feel this at all. They are just empty words. This is a problem in this novel – the characters do not effectively dramatise Lawrence’s lofty ideas. The novel is all caught up in the subjectivity of its author. Lawrence’s mouthpiece in this novel is Birkin. In every novel he wrote he had to have a mouthpiece and usually this is the character you most feel like slapping in the face.
On the positive side Lawrence can be brilliant at understanding women. Forget the overblown kitsch of the wrestling scene the best moment in this novel is when Ursula gives vent to her rage at Birkin. It’s a brilliant depiction of primeval female fury directed at the cajoling bullying instinct of the male.
I noticed Lawrence has a habit of placing opposition in his character’s feelings. This kind of thing - She was happy and yet she was resentful. He was curious and yet he was bored. They were resigned and yet they were hopeful. He does this all the time. I suppose it does have a place as this novel is about will – the wrestling of one will against another, whether it’s an individual or society as a whole. Lawrence is trying to forge a new concept of will. Ultimately the eternal snow-capped mountains will impede this dawning of a new day in human volition.
One of the reasons I loved this novel in my youth was that I idolised Katherine Mansfield and Lawrence uses her for the character of Gudrun and her husband John Middleton Murray for Gerald.
“Lawrence met Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry when they wrote to him in 1913 to ask for a story to publish in Rhythm - the magazine they edited together in London. When the Lawrences came to England the two couples met and established an immediate rapport. Katherine and John were witnesses at their marriage and Frieda gave Katherine her old wedding ring, which Katherine wore for the rest of her life. Katherine and Frieda never became real friends - Katherine’s affinity was always with Lawrence. There was tension in the relationship because Lawrence was deeply attracted to John, wanting to establish a ‘blood brother bond’ with him. John was also attracted to Frieda, with whom he had an affair after Katherine died. The two couples lived close to each other, first in Berkshire in 1914 and then in Zennor Cornwall in 1915. There were innumerable quarrels and the friendship was broken off several times. Lawrence once wrote to Katherine - a fellow consumptive; ‘You are a loathsome reptile stewing in your consumption. I hope you will die.’ Katherine understood Lawrence and even forgave him, writing in her Journal that ‘Lawrence and I are unthinkably alike.”
So, Women in Love: heavy on verbiage, rubbled with repetitive pseudo philosophy, burdened with three of most unlikeable characters you’re likely to meet in a novel all year and yet here and there dazzlingly brilliant as Lawrence was when he stepped down from his tiresome soapbox.
July 20, 2024
Someone let the wicked genie out of the lamp tonight. He's writing this, not me.
I promised myself I'd review only books I like.
But he has other ideas . . . and he's tied my hands behind my back and is typing as I watch.
WOMEN IN LOVE
by D. H. Lawrence
Hated the women. Felt sorry for the men who should have gone off together. Brighton in summer would have been a better end.
For the number of times I wanted to fling the book against a wall . . . and didn't, three stars.
The Wicked Genie
I promised myself I'd review only books I like.
But he has other ideas . . . and he's tied my hands behind my back and is typing as I watch.
WOMEN IN LOVE
by D. H. Lawrence
Hated the women. Felt sorry for the men who should have gone off together. Brighton in summer would have been a better end.
For the number of times I wanted to fling the book against a wall . . . and didn't, three stars.
The Wicked Genie
January 28, 2023
“But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.”
Women in Love (1920) is a novel by British author D. H. Lawrence, a sequel to his earlier (and, I think, even better) novel The Rainbow (1915), following 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. Gerald will inherit a colliery, and since coal-mining takes a hit in The Rainbow as an emblem of industrialization’s defiling of natural midland England, we really struggle to see how this relationship between art and coal could possibly work.
“They would never be together. Ah, this awful, inhuman distance which would always be interposed between her and the other being! There was nothing to do but to lie still and endure. She felt an overwhelming tenderness for him, and a dark, under-stirring of jealous hatred, that he should lie so perfect and immune, in an other-world, whilst she was tormented with violent wakefulness, cast out in the outer darkness.”
Lawrence contrasts this pair with teacher Ursula Brangwen and Rupert Birkin, an alienated intellectual who seems to articulate many of the opinions on men and women, love and democracy associated with the author. Lawrence/Birkin and Ursula debate for hours the nature of love, on this kind of near-Buddhist, “unknowing” level:
“You've got to lapse out before you can know what sensual reality is, lapse into unknowingness, and give up your volition. . . You've got to learn not-to-be before you can come into being.”
And:
“I want to be gone out of myself, and you to be lost to yourself, so we are found different.”
But this battle-to-define-love also has sweetness in it:
“They looked at each other and laughed, then looked away, filled with darkness and secrecy. Then they kissed and remembered the magnificence of the night. It was so magnificent, such an inheritance of a universe of dark reality, that they were afraid to seem to remember.”
Gerald and Rupert also have a strong attraction to each other: There’s a naked wrestling scene, (I recall vividly now the film version of this) evidence of Birkin’s feeling that he needs an intense—though different—love of a man as much as he needs the love of a woman. Intense is the order of the day always for each of these people.
Much of the novel is anguished, overheated talk, founded in powerful (or, if you choose, just overwrought, youthful) psychological and physical attractions. And they repel each other, too, or maybe it is best to describe them all as colliding with each other in love so intense it is on the edge of hate. Lots of fighting sometimes leading to tenderness. Most of the action, such as it is, happens in England and concludes on holiday for the foursome (and a few other characters woven in and out) in the Tyrolean Alps. This is Lawrence’s favorite of all his novels, and the one most drawing on his life, Ursula's character based on Lawrence's wife Frieda and Gudrun's on Katherine Mansfield, while Rupert Birkin's has elements of Lawrence himself, and Gerald Crich is partly based on Mansfield's husband, John Middleton Murry.
As we know from The Rainbow, Ursula is a schoolteacher, Gudrun a painter. Early on they establish that men and love are superfluous. Then Ursula meets Birkin, and--so much for giving up men!--they proceed to a tempestuous raging relationship, equal parts heat and light. Also early on the two best and quite different friends, Rupert and Gerald, have a similar conversation about women and love as superfluous, but then Gerald sees Gudrun, and they eventually develop a relationship, a case of opposites attracting. There’s heat, again, but less light, and the heat that is generated between them is that such as draws a moth to the flame. The two couples take a holiday together in the Alps where Ursula and Birkin resolve some of their basic differences, and Gudrun and Gerald decidedly do not resolve their differences. I love you, I hate you, I’ll be destroyed by you, I’ll destroy you. So much a struggle of wills. And then a dramatic conclusion in the snows of the Alps. It sounds here like I am not liking it, but Lawrence writes so passionately, you either have to laugh and throw this across the room or you must embrace him (that passionate love/heat thing seems to apply to his readers, too!) , and I seem to have fallen into bed with him (or: replace with wrestling metaphor here, but you get the point).
A 20-second clip from Ken Russell’s 1969 film adaptation, which made a through-line of romantic celebration (Woodstock was 1969) from Lawrence to the sixtes; Glenda Jackson won the Academy Award for her portrayal of Gudrun:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtjV5...
Memorable scenes:
*Gerald’s trying to force his mare to stay close to a passing train, to assert his dominance over it, torturing it bloody it in the process. This is cruel Gerald, control freak, the very image of the very male boss who must dominate, master, in an assertion of power and strength. Gudrun, the artist, sees this, is nevertheless confusedly attracted to him (he's a rich and powerful and repellent alpha male, in the way of bad boy romances), though she also fears he will dominate and possibly “destroy” her will.
*Gerald’s father, the owner of the coal mine, dying, refusing to give in to the dying of the light, produces some small but important vulnerability in Gerald, that leads him in the middle of the night to sneak into Gudrun’s house, and bed. We have some (small) hope for him and them on this night.
*Gudrun running and dancing among the cattle, the nature child. Precursor to sixties lovefest dancing and raves?
*Birkin asking for Ursula’s hand in marriage, (unplanned) before Ursula’s traditionalist father, which ignites a weeks-long struggle before she comes to her final decision.
Simone de Beauvoir said of the novel that it was phallocentric, but I—okay, I’m a male—saw more of a balance in the struggle between men and women. Ursula and Gudrun are the strongest voices and spirits in the story, in spite of a certain male power that is present. Women assert themselves against male dominance and find their voices and control over their bodies, in my reading. They get what they want, they don't accept what is not good for them, though they do struggle in the process.
“She was not herself--she was not anything. She was something that is going to be--soon--soon--very soon. But as yet, she was only imminent.”
“Women in Love” is a novel of ideas, but Lawrence’s lyrical prose is also expressionistically emotional, supercharged with erotic energy. It took a while to heat up, this novel of his twenties, and the twenties of these four young people, a book I first read in my twenties, perfect, but I finally fell in love with it again. Maybe it was the mid point of the book where it had its hooks in me again, when they seem to all give in to each other and have fun for a time, dancing, boating, with long wine-soaked conversations.
Like The Rainbow, which I actually liked better, with its primeval depictions of working-class England, Women in Love challenged Victorian conceptions of sexuality. It was great to return to it after more than 4 decades (!). I can certainly see how Lawrence might be disliked for all the (too?) emotional writing, but for me it perfectly captures the late sixties and early seventies counter-cultural focus on freedom, imagining, as it begins to do, alternate conceptions to mainstream industrial/corporate society (hey, communes!).
And sometimes the prose can be lyrical and lovely and soft:
“A dozen or more boats on the lake swung their rosy and moon–like lanterns low on the water, that reflected as from a fire. In the distance, the steamer twanged and thrummed and washed with her faintly–splashing paddles, trailing her strings of coloured lights, and occasionally lighting up the whole scene luridly with an effusion of fireworks, Roman candles and sheafs of stars and other simple effects, illuminating the surface of the water, and showing the boats creeping round, low down. Then the lovely darkness fell again, the lanterns and the little threaded lights glimmered softly, there was a muffled knocking of oars and a waving of music.”
A 5-minute scene from Women in Love by Ken Russell:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_ad8...
Women in Love (1920) is a novel by British author D. H. Lawrence, a sequel to his earlier (and, I think, even better) novel The Rainbow (1915), following 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. Gerald will inherit a colliery, and since coal-mining takes a hit in The Rainbow as an emblem of industrialization’s defiling of natural midland England, we really struggle to see how this relationship between art and coal could possibly work.
“They would never be together. Ah, this awful, inhuman distance which would always be interposed between her and the other being! There was nothing to do but to lie still and endure. She felt an overwhelming tenderness for him, and a dark, under-stirring of jealous hatred, that he should lie so perfect and immune, in an other-world, whilst she was tormented with violent wakefulness, cast out in the outer darkness.”
Lawrence contrasts this pair with teacher Ursula Brangwen and Rupert Birkin, an alienated intellectual who seems to articulate many of the opinions on men and women, love and democracy associated with the author. Lawrence/Birkin and Ursula debate for hours the nature of love, on this kind of near-Buddhist, “unknowing” level:
“You've got to lapse out before you can know what sensual reality is, lapse into unknowingness, and give up your volition. . . You've got to learn not-to-be before you can come into being.”
And:
“I want to be gone out of myself, and you to be lost to yourself, so we are found different.”
But this battle-to-define-love also has sweetness in it:
“They looked at each other and laughed, then looked away, filled with darkness and secrecy. Then they kissed and remembered the magnificence of the night. It was so magnificent, such an inheritance of a universe of dark reality, that they were afraid to seem to remember.”
Gerald and Rupert also have a strong attraction to each other: There’s a naked wrestling scene, (I recall vividly now the film version of this) evidence of Birkin’s feeling that he needs an intense—though different—love of a man as much as he needs the love of a woman. Intense is the order of the day always for each of these people.
Much of the novel is anguished, overheated talk, founded in powerful (or, if you choose, just overwrought, youthful) psychological and physical attractions. And they repel each other, too, or maybe it is best to describe them all as colliding with each other in love so intense it is on the edge of hate. Lots of fighting sometimes leading to tenderness. Most of the action, such as it is, happens in England and concludes on holiday for the foursome (and a few other characters woven in and out) in the Tyrolean Alps. This is Lawrence’s favorite of all his novels, and the one most drawing on his life, Ursula's character based on Lawrence's wife Frieda and Gudrun's on Katherine Mansfield, while Rupert Birkin's has elements of Lawrence himself, and Gerald Crich is partly based on Mansfield's husband, John Middleton Murry.
As we know from The Rainbow, Ursula is a schoolteacher, Gudrun a painter. Early on they establish that men and love are superfluous. Then Ursula meets Birkin, and--so much for giving up men!--they proceed to a tempestuous raging relationship, equal parts heat and light. Also early on the two best and quite different friends, Rupert and Gerald, have a similar conversation about women and love as superfluous, but then Gerald sees Gudrun, and they eventually develop a relationship, a case of opposites attracting. There’s heat, again, but less light, and the heat that is generated between them is that such as draws a moth to the flame. The two couples take a holiday together in the Alps where Ursula and Birkin resolve some of their basic differences, and Gudrun and Gerald decidedly do not resolve their differences. I love you, I hate you, I’ll be destroyed by you, I’ll destroy you. So much a struggle of wills. And then a dramatic conclusion in the snows of the Alps. It sounds here like I am not liking it, but Lawrence writes so passionately, you either have to laugh and throw this across the room or you must embrace him (that passionate love/heat thing seems to apply to his readers, too!) , and I seem to have fallen into bed with him (or: replace with wrestling metaphor here, but you get the point).
A 20-second clip from Ken Russell’s 1969 film adaptation, which made a through-line of romantic celebration (Woodstock was 1969) from Lawrence to the sixtes; Glenda Jackson won the Academy Award for her portrayal of Gudrun:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtjV5...
Memorable scenes:
*Gerald’s trying to force his mare to stay close to a passing train, to assert his dominance over it, torturing it bloody it in the process. This is cruel Gerald, control freak, the very image of the very male boss who must dominate, master, in an assertion of power and strength. Gudrun, the artist, sees this, is nevertheless confusedly attracted to him (he's a rich and powerful and repellent alpha male, in the way of bad boy romances), though she also fears he will dominate and possibly “destroy” her will.
*Gerald’s father, the owner of the coal mine, dying, refusing to give in to the dying of the light, produces some small but important vulnerability in Gerald, that leads him in the middle of the night to sneak into Gudrun’s house, and bed. We have some (small) hope for him and them on this night.
*Gudrun running and dancing among the cattle, the nature child. Precursor to sixties lovefest dancing and raves?
*Birkin asking for Ursula’s hand in marriage, (unplanned) before Ursula’s traditionalist father, which ignites a weeks-long struggle before she comes to her final decision.
Simone de Beauvoir said of the novel that it was phallocentric, but I—okay, I’m a male—saw more of a balance in the struggle between men and women. Ursula and Gudrun are the strongest voices and spirits in the story, in spite of a certain male power that is present. Women assert themselves against male dominance and find their voices and control over their bodies, in my reading. They get what they want, they don't accept what is not good for them, though they do struggle in the process.
“She was not herself--she was not anything. She was something that is going to be--soon--soon--very soon. But as yet, she was only imminent.”
“Women in Love” is a novel of ideas, but Lawrence’s lyrical prose is also expressionistically emotional, supercharged with erotic energy. It took a while to heat up, this novel of his twenties, and the twenties of these four young people, a book I first read in my twenties, perfect, but I finally fell in love with it again. Maybe it was the mid point of the book where it had its hooks in me again, when they seem to all give in to each other and have fun for a time, dancing, boating, with long wine-soaked conversations.
Like The Rainbow, which I actually liked better, with its primeval depictions of working-class England, Women in Love challenged Victorian conceptions of sexuality. It was great to return to it after more than 4 decades (!). I can certainly see how Lawrence might be disliked for all the (too?) emotional writing, but for me it perfectly captures the late sixties and early seventies counter-cultural focus on freedom, imagining, as it begins to do, alternate conceptions to mainstream industrial/corporate society (hey, communes!).
And sometimes the prose can be lyrical and lovely and soft:
“A dozen or more boats on the lake swung their rosy and moon–like lanterns low on the water, that reflected as from a fire. In the distance, the steamer twanged and thrummed and washed with her faintly–splashing paddles, trailing her strings of coloured lights, and occasionally lighting up the whole scene luridly with an effusion of fireworks, Roman candles and sheafs of stars and other simple effects, illuminating the surface of the water, and showing the boats creeping round, low down. Then the lovely darkness fell again, the lanterns and the little threaded lights glimmered softly, there was a muffled knocking of oars and a waving of music.”
A 5-minute scene from Women in Love by Ken Russell:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_ad8...
May 24, 2008
Ever noticed how many people hate DH Lawrence? Often for opposite reasons by the way--there are those who condemn his misognyny, while others allege him to be too doting of the fair sex. Which is it? Sometimes he's damned for being too obscene, but elsewhere dismissed as overly fussy about flowers and horses. He even gets clubbed for creating self-absorbed characters, just after someone has taken a swipe at him for promoting a harmful ideal of sacrificial love. All of these folks can agree that they strongly dislike to read Lawrence's books, but from hearing them converse, one might almost conclude that the entire group can hardly be discussing the works of a single author. The variety of accusations are impossible to reconcile.
I think it is just this pattern of polarized criticism of his work that ought to point us to the obvious power Lawrence held as a novelist. If a single man can provoke simultaneous accusations of depicting egotists and martyrs, obscenity and prudery, sexism against women and reverence for women, then obviously he is hitting his mark in there somewhere as an artist. Lawrence's critics might not all reach the same specific conclusions about the dreck they've just endured, but they are united in judging him a failure.
Now there are plenty of worthy theorists whose tidy explanation of these contradictory responses among Lawrence's critics is that they are not, in fact, contradictory. On the contrary, these psychologists argue that such disparate elements in Lawrence's writing are unassailable proof, not of the man's status as a literary genius, but of his latent homosexuality.
My two objections are strenuous, but almost too obvious to mention. First, the fact that Lawrence wrote a lot about women, love, the self, and sex proves nothing whatsoever about his being gay. It only proves that he was a human, and that his particular strategy for facing his complexity as a human was to write books about it. I happen to think it a great approach, and I find the results to be outstanding and insightful. So I'm happy he turned his feelings and thoughts into novels. Others however will stick to the view that he would have been better off at a gay bar.
The second problem with this dismissive response to Lawrence is that it doesn't answer the original question: how is it that Lawrence's critics say such opposite things when they complain about him, and so vociferously? To call him gay will never do, because simply to accuse a writer of being gay does nothing to explain how he can bring about this sharp contrast in opinions.
I think the truth is that Lawrence is guilty of all of the seemingly dichotomous charges being laid at his feet. But what has caused such alarm in others is a cause of tremendous joy in me. If you couldn't already tell, I'm a Lawrence fan. I love his books, and especially this one. ( Sons and Lovers is also brilliant.) It is full of beautifully made scenes in which you can actually feel the orchestrated and opposing emotions and thoughts of two different characters at the same time. Often these are scenes of disagreement, between lovers, between sisters, and between best friends. As I read, I was pulling for everyone because everyone is sympathetic.
Lawrence's descriptions of nature are often so powerful because of the barely restrained beauty of his objects, and because just as you are beginning to enjoy the ride, violence spills onto the scene and you are swept onto the next chapter. The scene where Gerald is trying to impress his girlfriend by riding his horse up to the edge of the train track as the engine flies past is a perfect demonstration of this ability Lawrence posesses.
The best part of this book is at the end when Gerald dies in the Alps while trying to understand life, and then the final mysterious dialogue between the remaining lovers, Rupert Birkin and Ursula Brangwen. Read the book.
I think it is just this pattern of polarized criticism of his work that ought to point us to the obvious power Lawrence held as a novelist. If a single man can provoke simultaneous accusations of depicting egotists and martyrs, obscenity and prudery, sexism against women and reverence for women, then obviously he is hitting his mark in there somewhere as an artist. Lawrence's critics might not all reach the same specific conclusions about the dreck they've just endured, but they are united in judging him a failure.
Now there are plenty of worthy theorists whose tidy explanation of these contradictory responses among Lawrence's critics is that they are not, in fact, contradictory. On the contrary, these psychologists argue that such disparate elements in Lawrence's writing are unassailable proof, not of the man's status as a literary genius, but of his latent homosexuality.
My two objections are strenuous, but almost too obvious to mention. First, the fact that Lawrence wrote a lot about women, love, the self, and sex proves nothing whatsoever about his being gay. It only proves that he was a human, and that his particular strategy for facing his complexity as a human was to write books about it. I happen to think it a great approach, and I find the results to be outstanding and insightful. So I'm happy he turned his feelings and thoughts into novels. Others however will stick to the view that he would have been better off at a gay bar.
The second problem with this dismissive response to Lawrence is that it doesn't answer the original question: how is it that Lawrence's critics say such opposite things when they complain about him, and so vociferously? To call him gay will never do, because simply to accuse a writer of being gay does nothing to explain how he can bring about this sharp contrast in opinions.
I think the truth is that Lawrence is guilty of all of the seemingly dichotomous charges being laid at his feet. But what has caused such alarm in others is a cause of tremendous joy in me. If you couldn't already tell, I'm a Lawrence fan. I love his books, and especially this one. ( Sons and Lovers is also brilliant.) It is full of beautifully made scenes in which you can actually feel the orchestrated and opposing emotions and thoughts of two different characters at the same time. Often these are scenes of disagreement, between lovers, between sisters, and between best friends. As I read, I was pulling for everyone because everyone is sympathetic.
Lawrence's descriptions of nature are often so powerful because of the barely restrained beauty of his objects, and because just as you are beginning to enjoy the ride, violence spills onto the scene and you are swept onto the next chapter. The scene where Gerald is trying to impress his girlfriend by riding his horse up to the edge of the train track as the engine flies past is a perfect demonstration of this ability Lawrence posesses.
The best part of this book is at the end when Gerald dies in the Alps while trying to understand life, and then the final mysterious dialogue between the remaining lovers, Rupert Birkin and Ursula Brangwen. Read the book.
October 17, 2020
Listen, I am redrafting a 500-page novel I wrote between the ages of 19-21. I have a comp sci degree to complete. I have 20+ Xmas books to read, I have 90+ movies to watch, I have the Guided by Voices canon to penetrate. There is no time for a witty capsule opinion of Women in Love, m’right? Believe me when I assert that this raw, raving, rage-filled, ragged-ass novel is something of an overwritten masterwork. G’night, asshats.
D.H. Lawrence RANKED
D.H. Lawrence RANKED
March 17, 2013
The best book I probably will ever read. I think I fell in love with Lawrence and his ideas. Am I sick?
May 31, 2024
Below are my initial thoughts on this novel rather than a “rounded” review. And I appreciate that it might not make a lot of sense for anyone who has not read this book yet. I hope to come back to the subject. But for now I think it is a starting point. It is supposed to be a sequel to “The Rainbow”. But it is so very different in tone and style that I hardly felt any continuity. This novel is almost entirely based on dialogue and actions as opposed to lyrical interiority of the first book. It is more quarrelsome in the absence of the better word. Also it is soaked in violence and cruelty of characters to each other and more surprisingly- to animals. In general, although there is an attempt of seeing the future, bitterness seems to prevail.
I’ve hardly recognised Ursula as a character. She seemed to change and become, well, more boring. In the dialogues her speech is often accompanied by the verb “cried” instead of “said”. So she comes across as mildly unbalanced. But then again I guess she is supposed to be representing “common sense” in the novel compared to the others. Her sister, Gudrun, who hardly figured in “The Rainbow” is more appealing character here. That does not mean likeable, but at least a bit more complex and disillusioned. And their men, the ones they are supposed to be “in love” are both frankly, pathetic. All four are full of snobbery and often contempt for others, especially the “common folk”.
To balance that out though, there are a lot of marvellous scenes and observations to keep this novel moving. Some minor characters are well done, surprisingly, animals including. The aggressive fighting rabbit or independently minded cat Mino are unforgettable. Hermione, a liberal aristocrat and socialite is very effectively depicted. The scene of her attack of Birkin with lápiz azul paperweight is very powerful. I can see why Lady Ottoline Morrell, the potential prototype, wanted to sue the author. But secretly i have to admit by the end of the novel I sympathised with Hermione’s intentions quite a bit. Birkin was quite insufferable as far as the characters go. However, some episodes including him were the best in the book. For example, Birkin throwing stones into the reflection of the Moon or Birkin running around naked in the field after being hit on a head by Hermione with that paperweight. Another memorable scene is Gudrun dancing a la “Isidora Duncan” in front of the cows. Who can forget that!
The last few chapters gain a bit in psychological depth. Also a new minor character Loerke brought a bit of dynamism in the discussion of the role of art. And there is of course a dramatic end. But it hardly justifies the whole.
With such sheer amount of dialogue, I was hoping it would crystallise into the novel of ideas. But it has never quite reached that level. Birkin talks constantly. But his thoughts are a bit shallow or jumbled more like bad sermons. Initially at least Ursula tried to challenge him, but then she stopped and started to “cry” as a response. “Cry” not in a sense of a distress sobbing, but in a sense of a raised voice. I tried to imagine how does that sound, and it seems it makes her sound a bit hysterical. For example:
Birkin:”When I see that clear, beautiful chair, and I think of England, even Jane Austen’s England—it had living thoughts to unfold even then, and pure happiness in unfolding them. And now, we can only fish among the rubbish heaps for the remnants of their old expression. There is no production in us now, only sordid and foul mechanicalness.’ ‘It isn’t true,’ cried Ursula. ‘Why must you always praise the past, at the expense of the present? really, I don’t think so much of Jane Austen’s England. It was materialistic enough, if you like—’ ‘It could afford to be materialistic,’ said Birkin, ‘because it had the power to be something other—which we haven’t. We are materialistic because we haven’t the power to be anything else—try as we may, we can’t bring off anything but materialism: mechanism, the very soul of materialism.’ Ursula was subdued into angry silence. She did not heed what he said. She was rebelling against something else. ‘And I hate your past. I’m sick of it,’ she cried.”
This is quite indicative of their exchanges and general pathos/depth of the novel’s discussions. She “cries”; he longes for the past green fields. And all of them “hate” one thing or another.
In a strange way, this novel has reminded me “A Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann written broadly at the same time and preoccupied with a range of ideas Lawrence attempts to touch upon. Both novels are driven by a dialogue and the characters. But when Lawrence goes for the language and visual effects, Mann manages to deal with ideas and zeitgeist of pre-war Europe in more profound way.
I totally agree with Francis Wilson who said in her book about Lawrence: “Only if we agree with Birkin on all counts does the novel become the prophetic event that Lawrence wanted it to be, and the only people who agree with Birkin are teenagers.”
But I will definitely remember Gudrun’s taste for colourful stockings.
I’ve hardly recognised Ursula as a character. She seemed to change and become, well, more boring. In the dialogues her speech is often accompanied by the verb “cried” instead of “said”. So she comes across as mildly unbalanced. But then again I guess she is supposed to be representing “common sense” in the novel compared to the others. Her sister, Gudrun, who hardly figured in “The Rainbow” is more appealing character here. That does not mean likeable, but at least a bit more complex and disillusioned. And their men, the ones they are supposed to be “in love” are both frankly, pathetic. All four are full of snobbery and often contempt for others, especially the “common folk”.
To balance that out though, there are a lot of marvellous scenes and observations to keep this novel moving. Some minor characters are well done, surprisingly, animals including. The aggressive fighting rabbit or independently minded cat Mino are unforgettable. Hermione, a liberal aristocrat and socialite is very effectively depicted. The scene of her attack of Birkin with lápiz azul paperweight is very powerful. I can see why Lady Ottoline Morrell, the potential prototype, wanted to sue the author. But secretly i have to admit by the end of the novel I sympathised with Hermione’s intentions quite a bit. Birkin was quite insufferable as far as the characters go. However, some episodes including him were the best in the book. For example, Birkin throwing stones into the reflection of the Moon or Birkin running around naked in the field after being hit on a head by Hermione with that paperweight. Another memorable scene is Gudrun dancing a la “Isidora Duncan” in front of the cows. Who can forget that!
The last few chapters gain a bit in psychological depth. Also a new minor character Loerke brought a bit of dynamism in the discussion of the role of art. And there is of course a dramatic end. But it hardly justifies the whole.
With such sheer amount of dialogue, I was hoping it would crystallise into the novel of ideas. But it has never quite reached that level. Birkin talks constantly. But his thoughts are a bit shallow or jumbled more like bad sermons. Initially at least Ursula tried to challenge him, but then she stopped and started to “cry” as a response. “Cry” not in a sense of a distress sobbing, but in a sense of a raised voice. I tried to imagine how does that sound, and it seems it makes her sound a bit hysterical. For example:
Birkin:”When I see that clear, beautiful chair, and I think of England, even Jane Austen’s England—it had living thoughts to unfold even then, and pure happiness in unfolding them. And now, we can only fish among the rubbish heaps for the remnants of their old expression. There is no production in us now, only sordid and foul mechanicalness.’ ‘It isn’t true,’ cried Ursula. ‘Why must you always praise the past, at the expense of the present? really, I don’t think so much of Jane Austen’s England. It was materialistic enough, if you like—’ ‘It could afford to be materialistic,’ said Birkin, ‘because it had the power to be something other—which we haven’t. We are materialistic because we haven’t the power to be anything else—try as we may, we can’t bring off anything but materialism: mechanism, the very soul of materialism.’ Ursula was subdued into angry silence. She did not heed what he said. She was rebelling against something else. ‘And I hate your past. I’m sick of it,’ she cried.”
This is quite indicative of their exchanges and general pathos/depth of the novel’s discussions. She “cries”; he longes for the past green fields. And all of them “hate” one thing or another.
In a strange way, this novel has reminded me “A Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann written broadly at the same time and preoccupied with a range of ideas Lawrence attempts to touch upon. Both novels are driven by a dialogue and the characters. But when Lawrence goes for the language and visual effects, Mann manages to deal with ideas and zeitgeist of pre-war Europe in more profound way.
I totally agree with Francis Wilson who said in her book about Lawrence: “Only if we agree with Birkin on all counts does the novel become the prophetic event that Lawrence wanted it to be, and the only people who agree with Birkin are teenagers.”
But I will definitely remember Gudrun’s taste for colourful stockings.
January 7, 2015
I want to find you, where you don’t know your own existence, the you that your common self denies utterly. But I don’t want your good looks, and I don’t want your womanly feelings, and I don’t want your thoughts nor opinions nor your ideas—they are all bagatellas to me.
If you’ve already experienced gag reflex, then you know what to partly expect from this book. Yet to say this was all this book was about, would mean I did not take the time to read all of it.
After having had friendly debates about men, women, and the ways in which they love, you will appreciate dialogue that toys with the questions: Who is the wife? Who, the mistress? And what of the playboy? Publish this book today and it will center on the complexities of dating. This is considered “the most important work by the most important twentieth-century English novelist” most likely because of the way Lawrence tends to write about desire and passion. He does this perfectly in Sons and Lovers and he takes it to an even more disconcerting level in this novel. Perhaps what he does most beautifully is stick with themes and setting; choosing instead to define his characters by the way they live and think. Pierce through into an inner thought, travel through some idea, and this is how you get to sense each character.
“You’ve got to lapse out before you can know what sensual reality is, lapse into unknowingness, and give up your volition.”
Find love in the form that works for you, is the message from Women in Love. It is a debate about the different forms of love and the choices each one has to choose his or her own kind of love: married love or partnership, passionate love or spiritual love.
The story focuses on feminist sisters, Gudrun and Ursula, and their significant others, Gerald and Birkin. Gudrun and Ursula are teachers who stand apart in society because of their ideals, even by the way they dress and interact with others (yes, a good shade of pink or yellow—or jeans in the midst of suits—always symbolizes the middle finger in the air). Is one woman “born a mistress?” Is the other settling for marriage or choosing love? To think, this was first published in a 1916 male repressive society, and yet these are female characters making such radical lifestyle choices, like Gudrun leaving home to live in London as a single artist.
Every December, Lawrence and I have our yearly encounter. In 2013 it was with Sons and Lovers. Last month, Women in Love. Though I saw him strike some universal themes with this work, I preferred the characters and story of Sons and Lovers, especially at those moments when the prose here deviated to this sort of madness:
…his body stretching and surging like the marsh-fire, stretching towards her, his hand coming straight forward like a stem. Her voluptuous, acute apprehension of him made the blood faint in her veins, her mind went dim and unconscious. And he rocked on the water perfectly, like the rocking of phosphorescence.
Seriously, why did that last sentence even take place?
In her literary critique of this book, Virginia Woolf wrote, “…one feels that not a single word has been chosen for its beauty, or its effect upon the architect of the sentence.” Oddly, this is why I love D.H. Lawrence’s unpredictable prose and weird word repetition (it rubs off, I've been repeating sangfroid for days now).
June 10, 2023
If you haven’t read Lawrence before, go back! Don’t read this novel first! It’s sort of a 500 level course of a novel, not because it’s difficult, but because it takes more patience and commitment, acquired only from some positive Lawrence experiences.
D.H. Lawrence started writing about the two Brangwen sisters in 1913, pairing them with the males in this book, Gerald and Rupert, but then he developed the sister’s background and family story. It grew into a huge tale, so he split it in two, and published the background story, The Rainbow, in 1915. The negative reaction to that one, including suppression and banning, delayed publication of the second part, Women in Love, until 1920.
These sisters were presented to us as unique and interesting feminist creatures in The Rainbow, but here they have morphed into poor excuses for human beings, something that made me angry through most of the book, but did I stop reading? Of course not! I love Lawrence, and think anything he writes is brimming with significance and poetic value. I was pissed though.
The story takes place in England around the outbreak of the First World War. There’s no explicit mention of the war, but Lawrence explores themes of life over death; choosing passion (love and art) over being a cog in the military/industrial complex; and when faced with the choice between the peace of an agrarian society and the mechanization of an industrial one, deciding to carve out a brand new option.
Lawrence seems to be channeling his poetry differently in this one. There aren’t pages of descriptions of flora and fauna here--he applies his poetry instead to ideas, and gives us primarily conversations (though there are plenty of flowers metaphorically popping up, and animals with strong symbolic meaning).
I don’t have the literary chops to analyze this properly, but I will say, contrary to the title, this is not about women in love. Women being infuriatingly childish, maybe, but primarily, one man’s need to conquer and another man’s wrestling with the problem of how best to exist with other humans, how to be fulfilled, how to love.
The characters are quite a foursome.
Ursula Brangwen: “'I think it’s much better to be really patrician, and to do nothing but just be oneself, like a walking flower.’”
Gudrun Brangwen: “She was not satisfied--she was never to be satisfied.”
Gerald Crich: “What he wanted was the pure fulfilment of his own will in the struggle with the natural conditions."
Rupert Birkin: “She knew all the while, in spite of himself, he would have to be trying to save the world.”
I didn’t believe anybody was really in love with anybody here, with one exception, a relationship that carries the novel and gives what I found a surprisingly beautiful and hopeful ending.
~~~~~
Some of my favorite evocative, provocative, thought-provoking lines:
“The two sisters were like a pair of scissors, snipping off everything that came athwart them; or like a knife and a whetstone, the one sharpened against the other.”
“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.”
“Her father was not a coherent human being, he was a roomful of old echoes.”
“You have never worked for hunger, or you would know what god governs us.”
“She was rarely alone, he pressed upon her like a frost, deadening her.”
“Oh God, the wheels within wheels of people, it makes one’s head tick like a clock, with a very madness of dead mechanical monotony and meaninglessness.”
D.H. Lawrence started writing about the two Brangwen sisters in 1913, pairing them with the males in this book, Gerald and Rupert, but then he developed the sister’s background and family story. It grew into a huge tale, so he split it in two, and published the background story, The Rainbow, in 1915. The negative reaction to that one, including suppression and banning, delayed publication of the second part, Women in Love, until 1920.
These sisters were presented to us as unique and interesting feminist creatures in The Rainbow, but here they have morphed into poor excuses for human beings, something that made me angry through most of the book, but did I stop reading? Of course not! I love Lawrence, and think anything he writes is brimming with significance and poetic value. I was pissed though.
The story takes place in England around the outbreak of the First World War. There’s no explicit mention of the war, but Lawrence explores themes of life over death; choosing passion (love and art) over being a cog in the military/industrial complex; and when faced with the choice between the peace of an agrarian society and the mechanization of an industrial one, deciding to carve out a brand new option.
Lawrence seems to be channeling his poetry differently in this one. There aren’t pages of descriptions of flora and fauna here--he applies his poetry instead to ideas, and gives us primarily conversations (though there are plenty of flowers metaphorically popping up, and animals with strong symbolic meaning).
I don’t have the literary chops to analyze this properly, but I will say, contrary to the title, this is not about women in love. Women being infuriatingly childish, maybe, but primarily, one man’s need to conquer and another man’s wrestling with the problem of how best to exist with other humans, how to be fulfilled, how to love.
The characters are quite a foursome.
Ursula Brangwen: “'I think it’s much better to be really patrician, and to do nothing but just be oneself, like a walking flower.’”
Gudrun Brangwen: “She was not satisfied--she was never to be satisfied.”
Gerald Crich: “What he wanted was the pure fulfilment of his own will in the struggle with the natural conditions."
Rupert Birkin: “She knew all the while, in spite of himself, he would have to be trying to save the world.”
I didn’t believe anybody was really in love with anybody here, with one exception, a relationship that carries the novel and gives what I found a surprisingly beautiful and hopeful ending.
~~~~~
Some of my favorite evocative, provocative, thought-provoking lines:
“The two sisters were like a pair of scissors, snipping off everything that came athwart them; or like a knife and a whetstone, the one sharpened against the other.”
“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.”
“Her father was not a coherent human being, he was a roomful of old echoes.”
“You have never worked for hunger, or you would know what god governs us.”
“She was rarely alone, he pressed upon her like a frost, deadening her.”
“Oh God, the wheels within wheels of people, it makes one’s head tick like a clock, with a very madness of dead mechanical monotony and meaninglessness.”
March 14, 2020
DNF-ing this 200 pages in because the reality is that I will not be able to finish it. The blatant patriarchal views and the utter arrogance of the two main male characters just make it difficult for me to go on.
The fact that every time a woman says something she is cut short and the man's reply starts with "No" while he attempts to enlighten the poor damsel of the mysteries of the universe, that HE had got access to because of his nightly ravings and deep introspective abilities that no woman could EVER hope to achieve in any of the possible worlds.
Liked the pessimism of it all, humans really are a damned horrible lot, but when a white (not straight, though) man says it and repeats it every five lines and becomes passive aggressive when a woman dares share her view, I just have to close the book and decide life is too short to deal with stupid books.
Don't know whether this Lawrence guy really was a sexist, but frankly I don't care; I'm sick of excusing misogyny on basis of "those were the times" or "but he is iRoNiC!" or whatever. We do have astounding unproblematic classics: let's read those instead simply because no one has to adjust anything when praising them. If you are a racist/sexist/xenophobic literary genius, then you aren't a genius.
And you aren't worth the time.
The fact that every time a woman says something she is cut short and the man's reply starts with "No" while he attempts to enlighten the poor damsel of the mysteries of the universe, that HE had got access to because of his nightly ravings and deep introspective abilities that no woman could EVER hope to achieve in any of the possible worlds.
Liked the pessimism of it all, humans really are a damned horrible lot, but when a white (not straight, though) man says it and repeats it every five lines and becomes passive aggressive when a woman dares share her view, I just have to close the book and decide life is too short to deal with stupid books.
Don't know whether this Lawrence guy really was a sexist, but frankly I don't care; I'm sick of excusing misogyny on basis of "those were the times" or "but he is iRoNiC!" or whatever. We do have astounding unproblematic classics: let's read those instead simply because no one has to adjust anything when praising them. If you are a racist/sexist/xenophobic literary genius, then you aren't a genius.
And you aren't worth the time.
February 23, 2016
This is not just because the narrator talks too fast and is really hard to understand, it's also because I'm just too old for this book. In my idealistic youth I would have found the ramblings of these people inspiring but now I'm bored. They go on and on about how the world is awful and I just had enough and can't finish it.
October 12, 2025
This novel ends, as so many novels before it have ended, with a pair of lovers sitting by the fire in contended domesticity. Yet it’s an indication of how strange and perverse this novel is that the scene is felt not to be a happy ending at all, but instead a kind of failure.
Lawrence’s books are often like this – all the trappings of a Victorian novel, but with twentieth-century emotions bursting through the surface. The form can no longer hold the content, and everyone seems to be driven half mad by it.
Women in Love is a kind of sequel to The Rainbow, a book which was fascinating but also, I thought, sometimes messy to the point of incomprehensibility. Here everything is more controlled, more driven by a focussed frustration over not being able to get beyond society’s conventions. And while The Rainbow was an intensely female novel, this one is marked by its attention to masculinity. The eponymous Ursula and Gudrun, when eyeing a lover, note ‘the magic of his thighs’, are overcome by ‘a glamorous thickness of labour and maleness’, or find themselves admiring ‘the beauty of his dim and distant loins’.
These are expressions of female desire that had barely been put down in print before, or not since the eighteenth century. And it’s not only the women who are taken by male beauty: the emblematic naked fireside wrestling match between Gerald and Birkin (captured so perfectly by Ken Russell in the 1969 film) is also part of the same theme. Heterosexual Lawrence, like homosexual Proust, is working in his fiction towards a kind of fundamental bisexuality for which society, to his annoyance, is simply not yet ready.
Because what are all these mutual attractions leading to, anyway? Surely not – as for previous generations – towards marriage, an institution which almost all the characters herein regard with utter scorn.
Instead there must be some other goal we can imagine – some other state that we should all be working towards. And as with sexuality, so with society: the increasing mechanisation of modern life, the automation of industry (the factories, the mines), is here felt to be a deadening presence, something stifling the life out of individuals.
For DH Lawrence this was epitomised by the ‘creeping democracy’ he so mistrusted and which gets such a bad rap in these novels. (‘How to disentangle the passion for equality from the passion of cupidity, when begins the fight for equality of possessions?’ someone worries.) Lawrence thought the working classes were completely unequipped to vote for national leaders, and wanted instead a ruling aristocracy appointed from the bourgeoisie. He himself was from a very poor working-class background, so although he was a terrible snob, he was not an uninformed one; but it perhaps explains a strange sense, when you read him, that he is saying sensible things for the wrong reasons.
His writing here has moved on a long way from the prose of The Rainbow, though it still shows many of his idiosyncrasies. Consider something like this:
If I was editing this for a friend, I would say it’s inadvisable to describe someone selling honey as ‘honied’, and that having nine adjectives in a sentence of twenty-three words is far too much. But in this book, Lawrence channels these moments of unconstrained ebullience to much better effect, unlike in the previous novel where they spiral across almost every page; one trusts the narrative voice more in Women in Love.
Still, the conclusions offered frequently seem too extreme. Birkin – the character most closely modelled on Lawrence himself – is so disgusted with society that he’s quite ready for an apocalypse to take humanity out of the picture entirely. ‘Don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought,’ he muses, ‘a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?’ This is perhaps (like many things in this novel) a sentiment whose time has come around again.
Others find their own solutions. Some disappear into the past (there is criticism of those who are ‘amusing themselves with Flaxman and Blake and Fuseli’ – who would do such a thing?); some finally accept society’s conventions; some seek new conventions abroad. The solutions Lawrence himself believed in were in some sense proto-fascist (Bertrand Russell said they ‘led straight to Auschwitz’), but it’s not difficult to look past them because the problems themselves are so familiar, so relatable, and so beautifully evoked. You read this with a thrill of recognition, and an ache to realise that every generation must go on answering the same challenging questions about how we live and how we love each other.
Lawrence’s books are often like this – all the trappings of a Victorian novel, but with twentieth-century emotions bursting through the surface. The form can no longer hold the content, and everyone seems to be driven half mad by it.
Women in Love is a kind of sequel to The Rainbow, a book which was fascinating but also, I thought, sometimes messy to the point of incomprehensibility. Here everything is more controlled, more driven by a focussed frustration over not being able to get beyond society’s conventions. And while The Rainbow was an intensely female novel, this one is marked by its attention to masculinity. The eponymous Ursula and Gudrun, when eyeing a lover, note ‘the magic of his thighs’, are overcome by ‘a glamorous thickness of labour and maleness’, or find themselves admiring ‘the beauty of his dim and distant loins’.
These are expressions of female desire that had barely been put down in print before, or not since the eighteenth century. And it’s not only the women who are taken by male beauty: the emblematic naked fireside wrestling match between Gerald and Birkin (captured so perfectly by Ken Russell in the 1969 film) is also part of the same theme. Heterosexual Lawrence, like homosexual Proust, is working in his fiction towards a kind of fundamental bisexuality for which society, to his annoyance, is simply not yet ready.
Because what are all these mutual attractions leading to, anyway? Surely not – as for previous generations – towards marriage, an institution which almost all the characters herein regard with utter scorn.
The hot narrow intimacy between man and wife was abhorrent. The way they shut their doors, these married people, and shut themselves in to their own exclusive alliance with each other, even in love […] a whole community of mistrustful couples insulated in private houses or private rooms, always in couples, and no further life, no further immediate, no disinterested relationship admitted; a kaleidoscope of couples, disjointed, separatist, meaningless entities of married couples.
Instead there must be some other goal we can imagine – some other state that we should all be working towards. And as with sexuality, so with society: the increasing mechanisation of modern life, the automation of industry (the factories, the mines), is here felt to be a deadening presence, something stifling the life out of individuals.
For DH Lawrence this was epitomised by the ‘creeping democracy’ he so mistrusted and which gets such a bad rap in these novels. (‘How to disentangle the passion for equality from the passion of cupidity, when begins the fight for equality of possessions?’ someone worries.) Lawrence thought the working classes were completely unequipped to vote for national leaders, and wanted instead a ruling aristocracy appointed from the bourgeoisie. He himself was from a very poor working-class background, so although he was a terrible snob, he was not an uninformed one; but it perhaps explains a strange sense, when you read him, that he is saying sensible things for the wrong reasons.
His writing here has moved on a long way from the prose of The Rainbow, though it still shows many of his idiosyncrasies. Consider something like this:
The sisters happened to call in a cottage in Willey Green to buy honey. Mrs Kirk, a stout, pale, sharp-nosed woman, sly, honied, with something shrewish and cat-like beneath, asked the girls into her too-cosy, too-tidy kitchen.
If I was editing this for a friend, I would say it’s inadvisable to describe someone selling honey as ‘honied’, and that having nine adjectives in a sentence of twenty-three words is far too much. But in this book, Lawrence channels these moments of unconstrained ebullience to much better effect, unlike in the previous novel where they spiral across almost every page; one trusts the narrative voice more in Women in Love.
Still, the conclusions offered frequently seem too extreme. Birkin – the character most closely modelled on Lawrence himself – is so disgusted with society that he’s quite ready for an apocalypse to take humanity out of the picture entirely. ‘Don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought,’ he muses, ‘a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?’ This is perhaps (like many things in this novel) a sentiment whose time has come around again.
Others find their own solutions. Some disappear into the past (there is criticism of those who are ‘amusing themselves with Flaxman and Blake and Fuseli’ – who would do such a thing?); some finally accept society’s conventions; some seek new conventions abroad. The solutions Lawrence himself believed in were in some sense proto-fascist (Bertrand Russell said they ‘led straight to Auschwitz’), but it’s not difficult to look past them because the problems themselves are so familiar, so relatable, and so beautifully evoked. You read this with a thrill of recognition, and an ache to realise that every generation must go on answering the same challenging questions about how we live and how we love each other.
July 16, 2024
Honestly, only Lawrence could get away with this kind of thing, and he really skates on thin ice most of the time.
Women in Love is ostensibly a sequel to The Rainbow, but it isn’t really, most of the characters are new, or newly important; Ursula Brangwen, who we followed for much of the earlier book, seems a different person, and Lawrence has even forgotten the names of some of her younger siblings. It’s a whole different book.
It’s also ostensibly a book about women in love (Ursula and her sister Gudrun), but is actually a book about men in love (suitors Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich), sometimes with women, sometimes with each other.
And frankly, much of it is completely insufferable. Another review warns readers from starting their Lawrence journey here, and I would underline that three times. This is my fourth Lawrence and I think the one with the highest barrier to entry. Always given to repetition, of words, of images, of concepts, or dialogue, Lawrence is in overdrive here. We are treated to an exhaustive description of everything Gudrun wears, and regular descriptions of Gerald’s moustache. Characters are constantly plunging into states of fear, of revulsion, of sneering, of mockery, or their souls are swooning.
Some random selections:
He slept in the subjections of his own health and defeat…Till now, she was afraid before him
Ursula was subdued into angry silence. She did not heed what he said. She was rebelling against something else.
He never admitted he was going to die. He knew it was so, he knew it was the end. Yet even to himself he did not admit it. He hated the fact, mortally. His will was rigid. He could not bear being overcome by death. For him, there was no death.
Five hundred pages pass crowded like this, and it is frequently dizzying, annoying or comical in its extremes.
But there’s no denying Lawrence’s power either. He breaks every rule in the book, certainly every rule we would now think of as important. He rants to his readers, usually through his characters. A person could become dizzy trying to parse exactly what Lawrence thinks… I was glad I had read his essays and knew that what Lawrence thinks can change and evolve even while he’s writing it.
One central thing anchoring this book is the tension between art and industry. Birkin buys an old chair, then gives it away, crying “I hate that old chair, though it is beautiful. It isn’t my sort of beauty. I wish it had been smashed up when its day was over, not left to preach the beloved past to us. I’m sick of the beloved past.” Gerald is the owner of a mine. And Gudrun, an artist, listens to the beliefs of another artist, who says:
There is not only no need for our places of work to be ugly, but their ugliness ruins the work, in the end. Men will not go on submitting to such intolerable ugliness…They will think the work itself is ugly: the machines, the very act of labour. Whereas machinery and the acts of labour are extremely, maddeningly beautiful… Art should interpret industry, as art once interpreted religion.
And there are wonderful scenes where things happen. A dying father, a boating accident, dancing in a German hotel, stealing a letter.
In someone else's hands, most of this would be complete gibberish. But with Lawrence, you just have to take him as he is. Here, he might be more what he is than ever.
Women in Love is ostensibly a sequel to The Rainbow, but it isn’t really, most of the characters are new, or newly important; Ursula Brangwen, who we followed for much of the earlier book, seems a different person, and Lawrence has even forgotten the names of some of her younger siblings. It’s a whole different book.
It’s also ostensibly a book about women in love (Ursula and her sister Gudrun), but is actually a book about men in love (suitors Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich), sometimes with women, sometimes with each other.
And frankly, much of it is completely insufferable. Another review warns readers from starting their Lawrence journey here, and I would underline that three times. This is my fourth Lawrence and I think the one with the highest barrier to entry. Always given to repetition, of words, of images, of concepts, or dialogue, Lawrence is in overdrive here. We are treated to an exhaustive description of everything Gudrun wears, and regular descriptions of Gerald’s moustache. Characters are constantly plunging into states of fear, of revulsion, of sneering, of mockery, or their souls are swooning.
Some random selections:
He slept in the subjections of his own health and defeat…Till now, she was afraid before him
Ursula was subdued into angry silence. She did not heed what he said. She was rebelling against something else.
He never admitted he was going to die. He knew it was so, he knew it was the end. Yet even to himself he did not admit it. He hated the fact, mortally. His will was rigid. He could not bear being overcome by death. For him, there was no death.
Five hundred pages pass crowded like this, and it is frequently dizzying, annoying or comical in its extremes.
But there’s no denying Lawrence’s power either. He breaks every rule in the book, certainly every rule we would now think of as important. He rants to his readers, usually through his characters. A person could become dizzy trying to parse exactly what Lawrence thinks… I was glad I had read his essays and knew that what Lawrence thinks can change and evolve even while he’s writing it.
One central thing anchoring this book is the tension between art and industry. Birkin buys an old chair, then gives it away, crying “I hate that old chair, though it is beautiful. It isn’t my sort of beauty. I wish it had been smashed up when its day was over, not left to preach the beloved past to us. I’m sick of the beloved past.” Gerald is the owner of a mine. And Gudrun, an artist, listens to the beliefs of another artist, who says:
There is not only no need for our places of work to be ugly, but their ugliness ruins the work, in the end. Men will not go on submitting to such intolerable ugliness…They will think the work itself is ugly: the machines, the very act of labour. Whereas machinery and the acts of labour are extremely, maddeningly beautiful… Art should interpret industry, as art once interpreted religion.
And there are wonderful scenes where things happen. A dying father, a boating accident, dancing in a German hotel, stealing a letter.
In someone else's hands, most of this would be complete gibberish. But with Lawrence, you just have to take him as he is. Here, he might be more what he is than ever.
October 13, 2017
No Pot O' Gold Past the End of The Rainbow
This was a letdown from The Rainbow (1915), which stirred and sizzled, was better written and seemed more momentous. In it, Ursula Brangwen came of age and defied the conventions of the unsophisticated environs in which she was raised, so she could selfishly search for satisfaction of the senses in a university town.
With Women in Love (1921), D.H. Lawrence continues his look at marriage and the relationships between men and women. Ursula is now a teacher who has a relationship with Rupert Birkin as coequals--modeled on Lawrence and his wife--who work to resolve their disputes and aspire to understand and honor each other's uniqueness.
On the other hand, her younger sister Gudrun Brangwen--a young teen at The Rainbow's end--now a sculptor, embarks upon and survives a fateful relationship with the indifferent industrialist Gerald Crich, an affair damned to failure by the uncompromising constitutions of each.
To be sure, Lawrence has something instructive to say about love and marriage, how it requires work, respect and compromise. Unfortunately, this did not work for me. It was too dry and perhaps a bit didactic. By comparison, I admired and enjoyed both Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow. Two out of three ain't bad.
This was a letdown from The Rainbow (1915), which stirred and sizzled, was better written and seemed more momentous. In it, Ursula Brangwen came of age and defied the conventions of the unsophisticated environs in which she was raised, so she could selfishly search for satisfaction of the senses in a university town.
With Women in Love (1921), D.H. Lawrence continues his look at marriage and the relationships between men and women. Ursula is now a teacher who has a relationship with Rupert Birkin as coequals--modeled on Lawrence and his wife--who work to resolve their disputes and aspire to understand and honor each other's uniqueness.
On the other hand, her younger sister Gudrun Brangwen--a young teen at The Rainbow's end--now a sculptor, embarks upon and survives a fateful relationship with the indifferent industrialist Gerald Crich, an affair damned to failure by the uncompromising constitutions of each.
To be sure, Lawrence has something instructive to say about love and marriage, how it requires work, respect and compromise. Unfortunately, this did not work for me. It was too dry and perhaps a bit didactic. By comparison, I admired and enjoyed both Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow. Two out of three ain't bad.
August 1, 2011
This is another old review, written for another website back in 2003, my memory of this book is shoddy at best.
I believe D. H. Lawrence, despite writing constantly about men and women in a risqué manner for his time, is gay. Why do I say this? Because of the three Lawrence novels I've read to date in only one does he even get close to writing an authentic relationship between a man and a woman. It's not in the two novels I would expect though. In Lady Chatterly's Lover and in Women in Love Lawrence writes about women as if they are an alien species that he has heard about but never seen. In each book during the sensual scenes (because honestly there is no real sex in Lawrence's books and I'm really at a loss why everything he wrote was deemed pornographic, even for the tighter laced post-Victorian era he wrote in) between a man and a woman I really expected him in earnest to write that women have teeth down there. You know in their loin regions. Oh, and before I start the review proper the one novel that he seems to write women well is in The Rainbow, the first novel in the Trilogy that follows with Women in Love and ends with Aaron's Rod. But, as one last pre-review aside, The Rainbow could have just been called Jude the Obscure - Part 2 since it read exactly like a Thomas Hardy novel.
So, anyway Women in Love is by some strange group of polltakers considered the most widely read English novel of the 20th Century (2011 addition: I have no idea where I came across this fact). I doubt this, and if I'm wrong then people really need to get out and read more of the 20th Century Classics. The story involves two sisters (the women who will fall in love), and two men (the recipients of this affection). Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, the daughters of the protagonist of The Rainbow, begin the novel by having a discussion about marriage. Ursula, the eldest daughter, is a schoolmistress (a teacher). Her sister, Gudrun, has just begun teaching also after a time away from their provincial hometown life. Gudrun was an artist of some merit that fluctuates throughout the novel to fit the scenes, but by an average account she made a modest success during her time in London. Why she returned to the backwoods home she grew up in is never quite explained, but she is back home, and that is enough for the novel.
The two sisters begin the novel by talking about marriage. Ursula for some unknown reason doesn't think she needs to get married, and this shocks her bohemian sister who for some reason can't understand why her sister would go against social customs. This scene is stupid in light of the novel taken as a whole. Both women throughout the novel change their opinion on this question with gusto. The reader after awhile has to wonder if Lawrence just happened to put words into the character's mouths to play devils advocate, or if he is trying to say something like women have a flippant nature. Besides very radical shifts in opinion the women are given very little description besides the color of clothes Gudrun is wears and that each are quite beautiful. What do they look like exactly? Well Lawrence is a bit vague on that. I never could quite get a mental image of either of them. Only one woman in the whole book is ever described in detail and she's a boyish built shorthaired baby-talking lispy nymph, who warrants pages of description but who is pretty much unnecessary for the plot.
The women really aren't important to the novel though, even though they are in the title. The real characters are the two men, Birkin and Gerald. Birkin, a self-portrait of Lawrence, is a local teacher also. Sometimes he's a preacher though; I couldn't tell which he really was. Once he was even something like the principal of the school. Oh but who cares for consistency, especially since he never seems to go to work or have any material responsibilities. The details aren't important anyway, but I'll get to that in a bit. Birkin is basically an opinionated bore, dressed in a Heathcliff-esque (Wuthering Heights reference, not the lazy cat) brooding manner who spouts off his quasi-naturalism to anyone happening to cross his path. Birkin's angry all the time, quite violent in speech and sickly. He is never painted in a good light and doesn't represent a very good model for Lawrence's personal philosophy (if this is what he is trying to achieve with the character). Ursula falls in love with this pig headed fool.
Gudrun falls in love with the other man, Gerald. Gerald's from a rich family that owns all of the coal mines in the surrounding area. He's quite good looking in a Germanic / Nordic way, and is the most richly described character in the book. He's just about as flippant as the women are though (as fitting the bottom to Birkin's top). He likes being a captain of industry. He hates being a captain of industry. He is having the time of his life with his adventurous lifestyle. Everything bores him to tears. He's a spineless worm around Gudrun. He's a domineering patriarch towards Gudrun. Why does he change? Sometimes we are given hints, sometimes the changes come after talking to Birkin, but most of the time they just seem to change in order to have something else for Birkin to expound about. One other thing about Gerald, Birkin loves him quite passionately and believes that a pure love between two men is stronger than any love a man and a woman can share.
So, what is the novel about? Basically these four people squabbling over each other and having a lot of fights based on 'strongly' held ideals. Not much happens in the novel. Events take place in the background, but the plot is never driven. There are not enough characters to create any intrigue over the romantic outcome, and the characters all seem to fall right in line with their respective partners too easily. Of course they fight, but every time one of them really gets angry the other one always seems to come crawling back in beaten submission to the gloriousness of the other. This is played out in just about every possible permutation (with the exception of Gudrun who only fluctuates between icy bitch and vaguely interested in Gerald (but she is a woman in love don't forget)). The novel breaks down to being about the ideas that Birkin holds and to a lesser extent the ideas of the other characters. None of the other three hold ideas drastically different from Birkin's though; they just aren't quite as passionate about them and that works as a set up for Birkin's angry assaults.
So what are the basic ideas? I'll explain them this way first. If you've ever read Ayn Rand's Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged take away the plot, keep the characters and everything about them, then remove the strong capitalist overtones but keep the strong individualism, bull headedness, and the way the strong characters dominant and lay themselves prostrate to each other and you've got the general idea of this novel. Or better yet read anything by Neitzsche and take away all the bookishness of his philological learning and just keep the random attacks on everything in modern society and you've got a pretty fair picture of Birkin. And Birkin is the novel.
If those descriptions don't help basically Birkin believes that everything in modern society is diluted, horrible, weak and wrong. Everything good about the world has been bastardized into a pale spectre of it's true self, and life is basically lived inauthentically by just about everyone. Only a few people are aware enough to realize this, and for those few living just a few pure moments is more valuable then living a lifetime like the masses do. Maybe if I hadn't read many other books that deal with this same idea I would find the ideas in this novel novel, but honestly nothing said was very interesting to me. I'd heard it all before, and read it in either more eloquent manners or with plots that sustained my interest beyond the constant preaching. When modern society isn't being critiqued to death various forms of love are being argued. These arguments could all have been taken straight out of Plato's Symposium with Birkin as the wise but assholeish Socrates at the helm.
On the topic of love, there are only two scenes where passion takes any kind of substantial form. The first is between the two men when they decide to wrestle each other. During this scene their 'oneness' gets penetrated by the other, and Birkin is surprised when Gerald rises up in a welcoming motion over powers and tops him. The only other scene is between Ursula and Birkin. This scene deals mostly with the mightiness of Birkin's loins, and the realization that not all truth of the world springs from the phallic center of man but deeper mystery's lie in the whole body of a man (man meaning man, not a pre PC word for people). Both scenes are quite homoerotic and added to my feeling that Lawrence only included the women to the novel as a social convention. The real love story is between the two men. The ideal a woman can fill in Lawrence's world is as an attractive beard that will act as a shield between the sensitive man and a harsh world.
I did like the book though, all criticism aside. I think that Lawrence is a very talented writer and worth being read. Even though the content of the book did little for me his writing style was wonderful and his description of place is amazing. I'd highly recommend The Rainbow to people interested in trying out Lawrence though. Actually I would recommend reading Thomas Hardy to anyone interested in the topics of pastoral English life during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and it's interplay between tradition and modernity as it relates to individual versus society. This novel, while considered a classic, I think boils down more to being an angry book by a man angry about the treatment his earlier books had received. It was difficult not perceiving this book as a five hundred-page rant by Lawrence.
This wasn't much of a consumer review, but basically I'd say if you are interested in reading the canon of 20th century English novels then you should check this out. If you are looking for a nice easy read I'd avoid this one and settle for something more interesting from the same time period. Who would I recommend? Well Thomas Hardy as I said, or Anton Chekov. I'm sure there are many other wonderful late 19th century writers who tackle Lawrence's terrain in a more enjoyable manner. I just realized that I'm only recommending 19th century authors in lieu of this 20th century writer. Maybe Lawrence would have been a better fit to the previous century. As a last stalwart against the High Modernist tradition emerging in the early 20th century he comes across as a bitter and reactionary opponent to the coming times, but his anger makes most of his arguments seem half-baked and impotent.
I believe D. H. Lawrence, despite writing constantly about men and women in a risqué manner for his time, is gay. Why do I say this? Because of the three Lawrence novels I've read to date in only one does he even get close to writing an authentic relationship between a man and a woman. It's not in the two novels I would expect though. In Lady Chatterly's Lover and in Women in Love Lawrence writes about women as if they are an alien species that he has heard about but never seen. In each book during the sensual scenes (because honestly there is no real sex in Lawrence's books and I'm really at a loss why everything he wrote was deemed pornographic, even for the tighter laced post-Victorian era he wrote in) between a man and a woman I really expected him in earnest to write that women have teeth down there. You know in their loin regions. Oh, and before I start the review proper the one novel that he seems to write women well is in The Rainbow, the first novel in the Trilogy that follows with Women in Love and ends with Aaron's Rod. But, as one last pre-review aside, The Rainbow could have just been called Jude the Obscure - Part 2 since it read exactly like a Thomas Hardy novel.
So, anyway Women in Love is by some strange group of polltakers considered the most widely read English novel of the 20th Century (2011 addition: I have no idea where I came across this fact). I doubt this, and if I'm wrong then people really need to get out and read more of the 20th Century Classics. The story involves two sisters (the women who will fall in love), and two men (the recipients of this affection). Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, the daughters of the protagonist of The Rainbow, begin the novel by having a discussion about marriage. Ursula, the eldest daughter, is a schoolmistress (a teacher). Her sister, Gudrun, has just begun teaching also after a time away from their provincial hometown life. Gudrun was an artist of some merit that fluctuates throughout the novel to fit the scenes, but by an average account she made a modest success during her time in London. Why she returned to the backwoods home she grew up in is never quite explained, but she is back home, and that is enough for the novel.
The two sisters begin the novel by talking about marriage. Ursula for some unknown reason doesn't think she needs to get married, and this shocks her bohemian sister who for some reason can't understand why her sister would go against social customs. This scene is stupid in light of the novel taken as a whole. Both women throughout the novel change their opinion on this question with gusto. The reader after awhile has to wonder if Lawrence just happened to put words into the character's mouths to play devils advocate, or if he is trying to say something like women have a flippant nature. Besides very radical shifts in opinion the women are given very little description besides the color of clothes Gudrun is wears and that each are quite beautiful. What do they look like exactly? Well Lawrence is a bit vague on that. I never could quite get a mental image of either of them. Only one woman in the whole book is ever described in detail and she's a boyish built shorthaired baby-talking lispy nymph, who warrants pages of description but who is pretty much unnecessary for the plot.
The women really aren't important to the novel though, even though they are in the title. The real characters are the two men, Birkin and Gerald. Birkin, a self-portrait of Lawrence, is a local teacher also. Sometimes he's a preacher though; I couldn't tell which he really was. Once he was even something like the principal of the school. Oh but who cares for consistency, especially since he never seems to go to work or have any material responsibilities. The details aren't important anyway, but I'll get to that in a bit. Birkin is basically an opinionated bore, dressed in a Heathcliff-esque (Wuthering Heights reference, not the lazy cat) brooding manner who spouts off his quasi-naturalism to anyone happening to cross his path. Birkin's angry all the time, quite violent in speech and sickly. He is never painted in a good light and doesn't represent a very good model for Lawrence's personal philosophy (if this is what he is trying to achieve with the character). Ursula falls in love with this pig headed fool.
Gudrun falls in love with the other man, Gerald. Gerald's from a rich family that owns all of the coal mines in the surrounding area. He's quite good looking in a Germanic / Nordic way, and is the most richly described character in the book. He's just about as flippant as the women are though (as fitting the bottom to Birkin's top). He likes being a captain of industry. He hates being a captain of industry. He is having the time of his life with his adventurous lifestyle. Everything bores him to tears. He's a spineless worm around Gudrun. He's a domineering patriarch towards Gudrun. Why does he change? Sometimes we are given hints, sometimes the changes come after talking to Birkin, but most of the time they just seem to change in order to have something else for Birkin to expound about. One other thing about Gerald, Birkin loves him quite passionately and believes that a pure love between two men is stronger than any love a man and a woman can share.
So, what is the novel about? Basically these four people squabbling over each other and having a lot of fights based on 'strongly' held ideals. Not much happens in the novel. Events take place in the background, but the plot is never driven. There are not enough characters to create any intrigue over the romantic outcome, and the characters all seem to fall right in line with their respective partners too easily. Of course they fight, but every time one of them really gets angry the other one always seems to come crawling back in beaten submission to the gloriousness of the other. This is played out in just about every possible permutation (with the exception of Gudrun who only fluctuates between icy bitch and vaguely interested in Gerald (but she is a woman in love don't forget)). The novel breaks down to being about the ideas that Birkin holds and to a lesser extent the ideas of the other characters. None of the other three hold ideas drastically different from Birkin's though; they just aren't quite as passionate about them and that works as a set up for Birkin's angry assaults.
So what are the basic ideas? I'll explain them this way first. If you've ever read Ayn Rand's Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged take away the plot, keep the characters and everything about them, then remove the strong capitalist overtones but keep the strong individualism, bull headedness, and the way the strong characters dominant and lay themselves prostrate to each other and you've got the general idea of this novel. Or better yet read anything by Neitzsche and take away all the bookishness of his philological learning and just keep the random attacks on everything in modern society and you've got a pretty fair picture of Birkin. And Birkin is the novel.
If those descriptions don't help basically Birkin believes that everything in modern society is diluted, horrible, weak and wrong. Everything good about the world has been bastardized into a pale spectre of it's true self, and life is basically lived inauthentically by just about everyone. Only a few people are aware enough to realize this, and for those few living just a few pure moments is more valuable then living a lifetime like the masses do. Maybe if I hadn't read many other books that deal with this same idea I would find the ideas in this novel novel, but honestly nothing said was very interesting to me. I'd heard it all before, and read it in either more eloquent manners or with plots that sustained my interest beyond the constant preaching. When modern society isn't being critiqued to death various forms of love are being argued. These arguments could all have been taken straight out of Plato's Symposium with Birkin as the wise but assholeish Socrates at the helm.
On the topic of love, there are only two scenes where passion takes any kind of substantial form. The first is between the two men when they decide to wrestle each other. During this scene their 'oneness' gets penetrated by the other, and Birkin is surprised when Gerald rises up in a welcoming motion over powers and tops him. The only other scene is between Ursula and Birkin. This scene deals mostly with the mightiness of Birkin's loins, and the realization that not all truth of the world springs from the phallic center of man but deeper mystery's lie in the whole body of a man (man meaning man, not a pre PC word for people). Both scenes are quite homoerotic and added to my feeling that Lawrence only included the women to the novel as a social convention. The real love story is between the two men. The ideal a woman can fill in Lawrence's world is as an attractive beard that will act as a shield between the sensitive man and a harsh world.
I did like the book though, all criticism aside. I think that Lawrence is a very talented writer and worth being read. Even though the content of the book did little for me his writing style was wonderful and his description of place is amazing. I'd highly recommend The Rainbow to people interested in trying out Lawrence though. Actually I would recommend reading Thomas Hardy to anyone interested in the topics of pastoral English life during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and it's interplay between tradition and modernity as it relates to individual versus society. This novel, while considered a classic, I think boils down more to being an angry book by a man angry about the treatment his earlier books had received. It was difficult not perceiving this book as a five hundred-page rant by Lawrence.
This wasn't much of a consumer review, but basically I'd say if you are interested in reading the canon of 20th century English novels then you should check this out. If you are looking for a nice easy read I'd avoid this one and settle for something more interesting from the same time period. Who would I recommend? Well Thomas Hardy as I said, or Anton Chekov. I'm sure there are many other wonderful late 19th century writers who tackle Lawrence's terrain in a more enjoyable manner. I just realized that I'm only recommending 19th century authors in lieu of this 20th century writer. Maybe Lawrence would have been a better fit to the previous century. As a last stalwart against the High Modernist tradition emerging in the early 20th century he comes across as a bitter and reactionary opponent to the coming times, but his anger makes most of his arguments seem half-baked and impotent.
August 31, 2009
I'm sorry, I just don't 'get' DH Lawrence. I think he is the most over-rated novelist I've ever read. And I have tried. I'm sure he broke the boundaries of what was permitted to be discussed in the novel BUT, besides the chapter involving the boating trip and resulting accident, nothing impressed me or remains with me from the book other than intense irritation with all of the characters. The women are unrealistic and the men, arrogant and dull. I wanted to slap the lot of them and tell them to get a life. It is so self-indulgent and self-important. If I'd been given this at school, I'd have been put off the 'classics' for life! What a waste of paper and time
September 19, 2024
In the Midlands before WWI but no fix date. There are arguments and disagreements of the moral value. Sister Ursula a teacher and Gudrun an artist. They meet up with two men that are friends. They leave and travel together to a snowy Alps here their relationships end badly, but IS this what Women in Love is about?
How one is involved with another in these types of relationships between women and men. What is the ideal type? Is marriage what one wants? Is it imaginable to even be married? Can you have a relationship without being married? Is it more exciting? These are thoughts of the sisters or DHL?
To the sisters marriage just seems crazy and downright ridiculous. They hope to avoid it. They want not to be of the norm. At first the girls are a team but by the second half they are at odds against each other.
The relationships for the sisters are part attraction to the opposite sex to a brutal repulsion of sorts. They enjoy men who fit their needs. The men do not think the same. They want like mindedness like a soulmate. The relationships go from sudden passion to an indifference while in constant dispute. The ending is quite dramatic.
Emotions go flying all over the place. Love and hate each relationship are of equal parts attraction and repulsion. A culmination of Lawrence's thoughts about relationships seems to be that it is filled with uncontrollable force. Thriving on disagreements of morality. Everything is in a tornado state. It is like Lawrence has to write with power, for lack of a better word, that this is how love and sex should be for love to exist.
Women in Love, its working title was Dies Irae (Day of Wrath), full of passion and intensity. It's style is extraordinary. Lawrence writes elegantly and brilliantly when portraying the women. His description of fashion is a nice distration. Totally different than anything I have read before.
Lawrence’s books were banned including Women in Love. The villain in this novel is actually a woman.
His writing has such an intense passionate beauty:
"The week passed away. On the Saturday it rained, a soft, drizzling rain that held off at times. In one of the intervals Gudrun and Ursula set out for a walk, going towards Willey Water. The atmosphere was grey and translucent, the birds sang sharply on the young twigs, the earth would be quickening and hastening in growth. The two girls walked swiftly, gladly, because of the soft, subtle rush of morning that filled the wet haze. By the road the blackthorn was in blossom, white and wet, its tiny amber grains burning faintly in the white smoke of blossom. Purple twigs were darkly luminous in the grey air, high hedges glowed like living shadows, hovering nearer, coming into creation. The morning was full of a new creation. When the sisters came to Willey Water, the lake lay all grey and visionary, stretching into the moist, translucent vista of trees and meadow. Fine electric activity in sound came from the dumbles below the road, the birds piping one against the other, and water mysteriously plashing, issuing from the lake."
How one is involved with another in these types of relationships between women and men. What is the ideal type? Is marriage what one wants? Is it imaginable to even be married? Can you have a relationship without being married? Is it more exciting? These are thoughts of the sisters or DHL?
To the sisters marriage just seems crazy and downright ridiculous. They hope to avoid it. They want not to be of the norm. At first the girls are a team but by the second half they are at odds against each other.
The relationships for the sisters are part attraction to the opposite sex to a brutal repulsion of sorts. They enjoy men who fit their needs. The men do not think the same. They want like mindedness like a soulmate. The relationships go from sudden passion to an indifference while in constant dispute. The ending is quite dramatic.
Emotions go flying all over the place. Love and hate each relationship are of equal parts attraction and repulsion. A culmination of Lawrence's thoughts about relationships seems to be that it is filled with uncontrollable force. Thriving on disagreements of morality. Everything is in a tornado state. It is like Lawrence has to write with power, for lack of a better word, that this is how love and sex should be for love to exist.
Women in Love, its working title was Dies Irae (Day of Wrath), full of passion and intensity. It's style is extraordinary. Lawrence writes elegantly and brilliantly when portraying the women. His description of fashion is a nice distration. Totally different than anything I have read before.
Lawrence’s books were banned including Women in Love. The villain in this novel is actually a woman.
His writing has such an intense passionate beauty:
"The week passed away. On the Saturday it rained, a soft, drizzling rain that held off at times. In one of the intervals Gudrun and Ursula set out for a walk, going towards Willey Water. The atmosphere was grey and translucent, the birds sang sharply on the young twigs, the earth would be quickening and hastening in growth. The two girls walked swiftly, gladly, because of the soft, subtle rush of morning that filled the wet haze. By the road the blackthorn was in blossom, white and wet, its tiny amber grains burning faintly in the white smoke of blossom. Purple twigs were darkly luminous in the grey air, high hedges glowed like living shadows, hovering nearer, coming into creation. The morning was full of a new creation. When the sisters came to Willey Water, the lake lay all grey and visionary, stretching into the moist, translucent vista of trees and meadow. Fine electric activity in sound came from the dumbles below the road, the birds piping one against the other, and water mysteriously plashing, issuing from the lake."
April 12, 2020
“Better a thousand times take one's chance with death, than accept a life one did not want.”
It is the sequel to his novel The Rainbow and even tho I read The Rainbow first, it doesn't matter which one u read first. I mean Rainbow got banned and people got to read this one first so who fucking cares.
The novel's sexual subject matter caused controversy... fucking prudes, am I right ladies?
Quarantine made me so lazy and I got into a reading slump. I wanted to write a lengthy review but it took me 50years to finish it and I forgot what I wanted to say. Lucky you I guess. Long story short, I think that this is better than Rainbow but that may be just me. No one knows, known cares. I haven’t being outside for a while and my period will probably come tomorrow so I don’t think I can be trusted.
‘’God, what is it to be a man! The freedom, the liberty, the mobility! You’re a man, you want to do a thing, you do it. You haven't the thousand obstacles a woman has in front of her.’’
Go off sis
It is the sequel to his novel The Rainbow and even tho I read The Rainbow first, it doesn't matter which one u read first. I mean Rainbow got banned and people got to read this one first so who fucking cares.
The novel's sexual subject matter caused controversy... fucking prudes, am I right ladies?
Quarantine made me so lazy and I got into a reading slump. I wanted to write a lengthy review but it took me 50years to finish it and I forgot what I wanted to say. Lucky you I guess. Long story short, I think that this is better than Rainbow but that may be just me. No one knows, known cares. I haven’t being outside for a while and my period will probably come tomorrow so I don’t think I can be trusted.
‘’God, what is it to be a man! The freedom, the liberty, the mobility! You’re a man, you want to do a thing, you do it. You haven't the thousand obstacles a woman has in front of her.’’
Go off sis
May 1, 2017
Ο D. H Lawrens εναντιώνετε σε όλα τα κοινωνικά στερεότυπα που τον πνίγουν… Στην φωνή του ήρωα του Μπίρκιν, ένιωθα ότι άκουγα τον ίδιο τον συγγραφέα, καθόλη την διάρκεια της ανάγνωσης. Θα μου πείτε βέβαια οτι οι μύχιες σκέψεις ενός ήρωα, είτε ακόμη και του ίδιου του αφηγητή, πρέπει να παραμένουν στο ίδιο το μυθιστόρημα και να μην θεωρούμε λαθεμένα ότι είναι οι ίδιες οι σκέψεις του δημιουργού, οτιδήποτε άλλο πέρα από αυτό, είναι παιδιάστικο. Όμως εάν διαβάσετε τις Ερωτευμένες γυναίκες θα καταλάβετε. Όλοι οι ήρωες υποφέρουν από την ίδια ασθένεια, την ανθρώπινη κοινωνία. Τους έχει αλυσοδέσει. Δεν μπορούν να εκφραστούν, δεν μπορούν να ερωτευτούν, δεν μπορούν να ξεφύγουν. Ο Lawrens πολύ πριν την σεξουαλική επανάσταση, επαναστάτησε για χάρη της. Όχι όμως για την πράξη καθεαυτή, αλλά για κάτι πιο βαθύ. Μας θυμίζει ότι δεν υπάρχει παρθενικός έρωτας. Όταν είσαι ερωτευμένος ποθείς. Θες να φιλήσεις, θες να αγγίξεις και να ενωθείς. Πως γίνεται αυτό να είναι βρώμικο; Πως γίνεται το ίδιο το κορμί σου, που είναι κομμάτι δικό σου, να είναι βλάσφημο;
Μου άρεσε αρκετά, το διάβασα όμως σαν μέρος του ίδιου του συγγραφέα του. Ως μικρή έρευνα για αυτόν τον ιδιαίτερο άνθρωπο. Ενέταξα το έργο στην εποχή του και στην προσωπική ιστορία του δημιουργού του και είπα μου αρέσει. Αν τον διάβαζα χωρίς να γνωρίζω τίποτα απολύτως, απλά και μόνο για διασκέδαση, θα μου άρεσε; Χμ… ίσως όχι και τόσο. Δεν έχω καταλήξει ακόμα, διότι αντικειμενικά το Ερωτευμένες Γυναίκες μου χάρισαν πολλά, ειδικά τροφή για σκέψη.
«Αν υπάρχει, πράγματι, κάτι ανυπόφορο, αυτό είναι ο εξευτελισμός, η εκπόρνευση των μυστηρίων που ζούνε μέσα μας (…)
Από τον Πρόλογο του D. H Lawrens, Ερωτευμένες Γυναίκες, μετ. Γιάννης Λάμψας, Εξάντας, 1980.
Μου άρεσε αρκετά, το διάβασα όμως σαν μέρος του ίδιου του συγγραφέα του. Ως μικρή έρευνα για αυτόν τον ιδιαίτερο άνθρωπο. Ενέταξα το έργο στην εποχή του και στην προσωπική ιστορία του δημιουργού του και είπα μου αρέσει. Αν τον διάβαζα χωρίς να γνωρίζω τίποτα απολύτως, απλά και μόνο για διασκέδαση, θα μου άρεσε; Χμ… ίσως όχι και τόσο. Δεν έχω καταλήξει ακόμα, διότι αντικειμενικά το Ερωτευμένες Γυναίκες μου χάρισαν πολλά, ειδικά τροφή για σκέψη.
«Αν υπάρχει, πράγματι, κάτι ανυπόφορο, αυτό είναι ο εξευτελισμός, η εκπόρνευση των μυστηρίων που ζούνε μέσα μας (…)
Από τον Πρόλογο του D. H Lawrens, Ερωτευμένες Γυναίκες, μετ. Γιάννης Λάμψας, Εξάντας, 1980.
November 28, 2017
After 170 pages I had to give up. I couldn’t relate to these upper class snobs who just whined endlessly about how dreadful life is. “Go get a job” I say – “change some diapers”, “cook a dinner”, “Have a glass of wine”. Do something! It’s repetitive with misanthropic conversations like:
Page 140 (my book)
There was silence, wherein she wanted to cry. She reached for another bit of chocolate paper, and began to fold another boat.
“And why is it,” she asked at length, ‘that there is no flowering, no dignity of human life now?”
‘The whole idea is dead. Humanity itself is dry-rotten, really. There are myriads of human beings hanging on the bush – and they look very nice and rosy, your healthy young men and women. But they are apples of Sodom, as a matter of fact. Dead Sea Fruit, gall-apples. It isn’t true that they have any significance – their insides are full of bitter, corrupt ash.’
‘But they are good people,’ protested Ursula.
‘Good enough for the life of today. But mankind is a dead tree, covered with fine brilliant galls of people’
I just could not see myself enduring this type of thought and dialogue for another 300 pages!
Everybody, in so many different ways in this, novel despises someone else. And its’ about domination and control – man over woman, man over animals, nature...
There is endless nihilism and a lack of humour (well I found myself snickering at passages like the above –as in here goes another rant from the author).
The individual characters are so isolated. In a chapter called “Class-Room”, where one of our main characters is a teacher, two of her “friends” enter and in full view of the class embark into a sordid philosophical conversation of the evils and futility of mankind. Suddenly our teacher dismisses her class – and I suppose her students silently leave. The entire atmosphere was very unreal – as if the students would remain stupefied quiet through-out this. No reference by D.H. Lawrence is made to the youthful inhabitants of the classroom – for him they simply don’t exist.
Years ago I read Lady Chatterley’s Lover which had a story-line and passion. “Women in Love” is bleak and cold. One gets the impression that the author had serious psychological problems.
Page 140 (my book)
There was silence, wherein she wanted to cry. She reached for another bit of chocolate paper, and began to fold another boat.
“And why is it,” she asked at length, ‘that there is no flowering, no dignity of human life now?”
‘The whole idea is dead. Humanity itself is dry-rotten, really. There are myriads of human beings hanging on the bush – and they look very nice and rosy, your healthy young men and women. But they are apples of Sodom, as a matter of fact. Dead Sea Fruit, gall-apples. It isn’t true that they have any significance – their insides are full of bitter, corrupt ash.’
‘But they are good people,’ protested Ursula.
‘Good enough for the life of today. But mankind is a dead tree, covered with fine brilliant galls of people’
I just could not see myself enduring this type of thought and dialogue for another 300 pages!
Everybody, in so many different ways in this, novel despises someone else. And its’ about domination and control – man over woman, man over animals, nature...
There is endless nihilism and a lack of humour (well I found myself snickering at passages like the above –as in here goes another rant from the author).
The individual characters are so isolated. In a chapter called “Class-Room”, where one of our main characters is a teacher, two of her “friends” enter and in full view of the class embark into a sordid philosophical conversation of the evils and futility of mankind. Suddenly our teacher dismisses her class – and I suppose her students silently leave. The entire atmosphere was very unreal – as if the students would remain stupefied quiet through-out this. No reference by D.H. Lawrence is made to the youthful inhabitants of the classroom – for him they simply don’t exist.
Years ago I read Lady Chatterley’s Lover which had a story-line and passion. “Women in Love” is bleak and cold. One gets the impression that the author had serious psychological problems.
October 1, 2022
#RetoEdwardianspirit de la cuenta @victorianspiritsblog, premisa “Un Libro Escandaloso”.
Increíble los sentimientos tan encontrados que me ha generado esta lectura.
Para ser sincera, no era mi primera elección para la premisa de un libro escandaloso. Esta fue la que más problemas me dio para elegir que leer, ya que tenía varias opciones. “Mujeres Enamoradas” estaba entre los candidatos, pero no era el libro que más ganas tenía de leer y no era, por ello, mi primera elección. Hasta que hace poco, hable con unos amigos que si que habían leído esta novela y que tenían ideas muy dispares sobre la misma.Eso fue lo que me llamó la atención y me animo a leer este libro. Además es que tenía ya muchas ganas de conocer la prosa de D. H. Lawrence, un autor que hasta ahora no había leído y al que tenía muchas ganas.
Y sinceramente no sé si hecho lo correcto al animarme con este título.
El libro vira entorno hacia el eterno, y muchas veces tratado, dilema de las relaciones de pareja y de lo que estas suponen. Esto se desmenuza por medio de dos relaciones. Por un lado tenemos la de la profesora Úrsula con Birkin, un hombre de personalidad compleja y férreos principios que esconden un alma demasiado idealista y desapegada de la realidad. Irónicamente, estas características de Birkin será lo que en un principio más problemas genere en la pareja, pero paulativamente también será será lo que haga que Úrsula se enamore de él y los dos forjen una relación cercana y saludable. Y por otro lado, tenemos el tandem formado por la hermana de Úrsula, Gudrum, y el rico empresario minero Gerald. Los dos son guapos y cosmopolitas, lleno de ambiciones y con personalidades que necesitan imponerse ante los demás y, especialmente, el uno sobre la otra y viceversa.
Estamos, pues, ante dos relaciones y la representación de diferentes formas de entender la vida, el amor, la sexualidad y las relaciones. Bajo una prosa aparentemente plácida y directa, se esconde una poderosa sutileza narrativa que enmarca todo lo que leemos, toda la narración es un compendio de capas sobre capas que el lector tiene la obligación de ir desenvolvimiento lentamente para llegar a la cantidad de temas e ideas que Lawrence maneja en esta obra. La amistad, el nacionalismo, el existencialismo, la sexualidad y el feminismo jalonan constantemente esta historia, y junto al desarrollo de las dos parejas forma un todo mucho más complejo de que parece a simple vista. Incluso la homosexualidad aparece sutil, pero poderosamente representada en esta obra tan transgresora por su contenido y su continente. La dicotomía entre hombres y mujeres en todas sus vertientes está aquí también explicada. Incluso que al final la cuestión quede abierta, me parece algo muy coherente con todo lo que se ha leído. Porque la complejidad de las relaciones humanas da para mucho, y en ellas nada puede darse por finiquitado o por supuesto. En general la novela es un juego de espejos en los que se reflejan muchas cosas, más de las que las propias palabras de Lawrence dictan. No solo se trata largo y tendido de la situación ideológica y social de la Inglaterra de principios del siglo XX. También (como no podía ser de otra forma) es una crítica cruda y feroz hacia una sociedad firmemente basada en la posición social, el materialismo, la necesidad de poder y el erotismo carente de autentico interés por la otra persona.
Entonces ¿Qué es lo que me ha fallado en este libro? Creo que mi gran problema con él es que no he podido conectar con la forma en que está escrito. Si la novela se centrase únicamente en las escenas en las que se incide en la trama propiamente dicha, sería muchísimo más corta. Pero esta narrativa, más que en esa trama, se basa en escenas en la que los personajes hablan sobre sus ideas y sus sentimientos y en descripciones psicológicas muy nítidas y largas. Es decir, es un libro más introspectivo que otra cosa. Y por ello en muchos momentos sentí que la historia no fluía correctamente, estancándose muchas veces. De ahí que su dramático final me haya dejado muy fría, cuando hubiera tenido que haberme dejado impactada y sobrecogida. Me gusta pensar que esto se ha debido al momento anímico en el que he cogido esta lectura, ya que ahora mismo hubiera necesitado algo con más acción, movimiento y sencillez. Si hubiera estado mentalmente preparada, estoy convencida de que hubiera disfrutado esta novela mil veces más, ya que tiene mucha calidad y Lawrence no es mal escritor para nada. A todo esto se suma una cuestión que no estoy segura hasta qué punto ha incidido en mi impresión de este libro: y es que este “Mujeres Enamoradas” es la segunda parte de otra obra del mismo autor, “El Arco Iris”, algo que no descubrí hasta mitad de la lectura cuando buscaba información sobre la misma . No me ha dado la impresión de que me perdiera muchas cosas, excepto por alguna que otra mención a los padres de las protagonistas, en general he seguido muy bien de qué iba el titulo que nos ocupa. Pero me queda la duda de que si hubiera leído antes “El Arco Iris” no hubiera podido entender mejor a los personajes y el porque actúan y piensan como lo hacen.
Y la conclusión de todo esto es que “Mujeres Enamoradas” ha sido una lectura tan agotadora que, de hecho, me ha dejo prácticamente a las puertas de un paron lector que sigo arrastrando, con ganas de estarme unos días sin leer nada, y mira que tengo mogollón de libros pendientes que me muero por empezar y que estoy convencida de que me van a encantar. Pero nada. Una situación triste, porque estaba convencida de que esta novela iba a gustarme mucho más. Pero mentiría si no dijera que prácticamente desde la página cincuenta me obligue a seguir con ella, motivo por el cual he avanzado con su lectura muy lenta y penosamente. Ha tenido momentos en los que la he disfrutado, sí, y por suerte no han sido pocos, pero durante una considerable parte del tiempo no he logrado conectar realmente con la historia y con sus personajes. No he logrado disfrutar con ella en muchos momentos, ni realmente engancharme a ella, ni nada. Y tengo que decir que me ha dado muchísima rabia y no solo por lo que comento más arriba. Porque no se puede negar que Lawrence escribe muy bien. Realmente bien.
Si hay algo que me ha gustado mucho es la manera en la que incide en la psicología de sus personajes, como va desarrollándola y trabajándola con mucha inteligencia e intensidad, sin dejar nunca de ser incisivo, desnudando sus almas delante del lector con todas sus luces y sus sombras, sin dejarse nada en el tintero. Y esto debe en gran parte de una de las cosas que más me gustado de este autor: la forma en que describe a sus personajes nunca es superficial y tampoco condescendiente. Les representa sin hacer juicios morales sobre ellos, sin prejuicios, sin juzgarles. Su forma de pensar, sus sentimientos y las consecuencias que tienen sus actos son lo que son y no hay nada más. Son personajes profundamente humanos, en ellos no hay nada al azar. Tanto su forma de ser como las relaciones que se establecen entre ellos no son nada tópicas ni cuadriculadas, como suele suceder en el mundo real.Dichos personajes no fueron concebidos para caer bien al publico, y Lawrence ni lo intenta. Muchas veces (la inmensa mayoría de las veces, para que mentir) me habría gustado mucho empatizar con ellos, pero me ha resultado del todo imposible. Había en ellos cosas que se me escapaban y que no acababa de comprender. No en pocas ocasiones me han resultado excesivamente escabrosos y laberínticos, profundamente egoístas y demasiado enfocados en sí mismos.No podía entender a qué se debía muchas de sus reacciones o de los sentimientos que profesaban. Pero, pese a todo, al mismo tiempo tengo que reconocer que esa es una de las gracias tanto de la novela como de los propios caracteres. Ver como van evolucionando y entender sus procesos mentales. Aunque muchas veces no los haya podido entender y me haya dado la impresión que se tratan de personajes que se dedican a pensar en muchas cosas y hacer poco, a su manera están tan bien construidos dentro de su lógica, que el lector puede entenderles a la perfección. Y no solo ocurre con los cuatro personajes principales, también pasa con los secundarios. Esto pasa, por ejemplo, con el padre de Gerald y con Hermione Crich, a quienes las riquezas y la fortuna social no les dan paz y felicidad.
Algo que me parece muy destacable es que aunque los cuatro miembros principales del elenco tienen la misma importancia y están igual de bien caracterizados, si hay quienes se llevan la palma son los personajes de Úrsula y Gudrum. Las dos hermanas no son protagonistas románticas tópicas para nada. Son mujeres de su tiempo, plenamente conscientes de su posición como hijas de un minero y de las dificultades y prejuicios a los que deben hacer frente por su condición femenina dentro de la sociedad eduardiana. No es que las dos deseen ser algo más que simples esposas o amantes. Es que están decididas a ser algo más. Las dos hermanas (con sus diferencias en cuanto a personalidades, metas y formas de pensar) son hijas de una concepción moderna del papel de la mujer, y dentro de la historia no se limitan a tener roles meramente pasivos y a suspirar por sus enamorados. Úrsula y Gudrum tendrán un papel tan decisivo en sus relaciones como Birkin y Gerald. Son unos personajes femeninos muy adelantados para su época, y ellas hay representada una fuerte carga feminista que se ve en varias ocasiones dentro de la obra. Como se ha dicho ya varias veces, Birkin y Gerald no les van a la zaga. Su amistad es también uno de los pilares sobre los que se cimienta esta lectura, tan llena de claroscuros como no están cualquiera de las otras relaciones que aparecen en las páginas de este libro. Tiene un fuerte componente homo erótico bastante bien desarrollado y muy perceptible, algo que reconozco que me ha sorprendido. Sabía que era una novela que se consideró muy escandalosa para la época, pero no me imaginaba que Lawrence hubiera ido más lejos que tratar la sexualidad desde una perspectiva heterosexual.
La forma de Lawrence de entender el amor me ha parecido preciosa y especial, porque no está para nada idealizada , y eso hace que la novela resulte poderosamente realista en todos sus sentidos. Gracias a esto “Mujeres Enamoradas” es una obra que sin ser romántica trate del amor. Y por ello resulto tan rádical para la época en que la novela fue publicada. El amor para Lawrence es algo que no tiene fronteras, que permite que dos personas sean ellas mismas de una forma individualizada, y a la vez puedan compenetrarse totalmente con la otra parte de la relación. La manera natural en que el amor es reflejado en esta novela se contrasta y complementa con la forma en que la sexualidad es representada. Ambos van de la mano, y aunque resulten tortuosos, no por ello hay que rechazarlos o quitarles importancia. La sexualidad es vista como una vía para que el ser humano pueda trascender sus propias limitaciones sensoriales y personales, una forma de derribar barreras y de conocerse a si mismo mucho mejor, de una forma más trascendental y profunda. Y de esta forma, Lawrence crea escuela al hacer que el amor y el deseo se conviertan en partes intrínsecas de las relaciones amorosas, que se encaucen por una senda no exenta de peligros y vericuetos, pero que puede llevar a conseguir un autoconocimiento más completo a juego con una gran satisfacción personal y la perfecta comunión intelectual y sentimental con el otro (cuando recuerdo que a Virginia Woolf y a los del Círculo de Bloomsbury Lawrence les parecia demasiado sensual para ser un buen escritor…no lo entiendo)
Y es que, criticas sociales y personajes perturbadores a parte, no he podido evitar sentir simpatía por Lawrence. Toda esta lectura rezuma un idealismo y una sensibilidad inmensas y una amplitud de miras que muchos de sus coetáneos podrían llegar a envidiar , y por todo esto su figura me ha resultado sorprendente conmovedora. No ha sido hasta después haber terminado “Mujeres Enamoradas” que busque información sobre la biografía de este autor. Y lo que leí no me sorprendió para nada. Ya no solo por haber descubierto como las circunstancias en las que nació y vivío, y su propia personalidad compleja marcaron su bibliografía (o por lo menos el libro que nos ocupa, que ya os he dicho que ha sido el primero que leo de él). Toda esta novela, para mí, de principio a fin ha estado impregnada por una atmósfera de desarraigo y de búsqueda de un lugar en el mundo que he comprendido y asimilado perfectamente después de haber sabido más cosas sobre la biografía y personalidad de Lawrence.
Sé con seguridad que no va a ser la última incursión que vaya a hacer en la prosa de D.H. Lawrence (me pica la curiosidad y me siento, en cierta forma, obligada a leer “El Arco Iris” cuando pueda. Y tengo desde hace mucho tiempo cogiendo polvo en mis estanterías el polémico y celebre “El Amante de Lady Chatterley”). Pero espero que una vez que ya me he metido dentro de su mundo tan complejo, pese a lo que pueda parecer a simple vista, y ya sepa a qué atenerme, estas lecturas me gusten mucho más y pueda conectar mejor con ellas y apreciar a este autor como creo que realmente se merece. Ojalá.
Increíble los sentimientos tan encontrados que me ha generado esta lectura.
Para ser sincera, no era mi primera elección para la premisa de un libro escandaloso. Esta fue la que más problemas me dio para elegir que leer, ya que tenía varias opciones. “Mujeres Enamoradas” estaba entre los candidatos, pero no era el libro que más ganas tenía de leer y no era, por ello, mi primera elección. Hasta que hace poco, hable con unos amigos que si que habían leído esta novela y que tenían ideas muy dispares sobre la misma.Eso fue lo que me llamó la atención y me animo a leer este libro. Además es que tenía ya muchas ganas de conocer la prosa de D. H. Lawrence, un autor que hasta ahora no había leído y al que tenía muchas ganas.
Y sinceramente no sé si hecho lo correcto al animarme con este título.
El libro vira entorno hacia el eterno, y muchas veces tratado, dilema de las relaciones de pareja y de lo que estas suponen. Esto se desmenuza por medio de dos relaciones. Por un lado tenemos la de la profesora Úrsula con Birkin, un hombre de personalidad compleja y férreos principios que esconden un alma demasiado idealista y desapegada de la realidad. Irónicamente, estas características de Birkin será lo que en un principio más problemas genere en la pareja, pero paulativamente también será será lo que haga que Úrsula se enamore de él y los dos forjen una relación cercana y saludable. Y por otro lado, tenemos el tandem formado por la hermana de Úrsula, Gudrum, y el rico empresario minero Gerald. Los dos son guapos y cosmopolitas, lleno de ambiciones y con personalidades que necesitan imponerse ante los demás y, especialmente, el uno sobre la otra y viceversa.
Estamos, pues, ante dos relaciones y la representación de diferentes formas de entender la vida, el amor, la sexualidad y las relaciones. Bajo una prosa aparentemente plácida y directa, se esconde una poderosa sutileza narrativa que enmarca todo lo que leemos, toda la narración es un compendio de capas sobre capas que el lector tiene la obligación de ir desenvolvimiento lentamente para llegar a la cantidad de temas e ideas que Lawrence maneja en esta obra. La amistad, el nacionalismo, el existencialismo, la sexualidad y el feminismo jalonan constantemente esta historia, y junto al desarrollo de las dos parejas forma un todo mucho más complejo de que parece a simple vista. Incluso la homosexualidad aparece sutil, pero poderosamente representada en esta obra tan transgresora por su contenido y su continente. La dicotomía entre hombres y mujeres en todas sus vertientes está aquí también explicada. Incluso que al final la cuestión quede abierta, me parece algo muy coherente con todo lo que se ha leído. Porque la complejidad de las relaciones humanas da para mucho, y en ellas nada puede darse por finiquitado o por supuesto. En general la novela es un juego de espejos en los que se reflejan muchas cosas, más de las que las propias palabras de Lawrence dictan. No solo se trata largo y tendido de la situación ideológica y social de la Inglaterra de principios del siglo XX. También (como no podía ser de otra forma) es una crítica cruda y feroz hacia una sociedad firmemente basada en la posición social, el materialismo, la necesidad de poder y el erotismo carente de autentico interés por la otra persona.
Entonces ¿Qué es lo que me ha fallado en este libro? Creo que mi gran problema con él es que no he podido conectar con la forma en que está escrito. Si la novela se centrase únicamente en las escenas en las que se incide en la trama propiamente dicha, sería muchísimo más corta. Pero esta narrativa, más que en esa trama, se basa en escenas en la que los personajes hablan sobre sus ideas y sus sentimientos y en descripciones psicológicas muy nítidas y largas. Es decir, es un libro más introspectivo que otra cosa. Y por ello en muchos momentos sentí que la historia no fluía correctamente, estancándose muchas veces. De ahí que su dramático final me haya dejado muy fría, cuando hubiera tenido que haberme dejado impactada y sobrecogida. Me gusta pensar que esto se ha debido al momento anímico en el que he cogido esta lectura, ya que ahora mismo hubiera necesitado algo con más acción, movimiento y sencillez. Si hubiera estado mentalmente preparada, estoy convencida de que hubiera disfrutado esta novela mil veces más, ya que tiene mucha calidad y Lawrence no es mal escritor para nada. A todo esto se suma una cuestión que no estoy segura hasta qué punto ha incidido en mi impresión de este libro: y es que este “Mujeres Enamoradas” es la segunda parte de otra obra del mismo autor, “El Arco Iris”, algo que no descubrí hasta mitad de la lectura cuando buscaba información sobre la misma . No me ha dado la impresión de que me perdiera muchas cosas, excepto por alguna que otra mención a los padres de las protagonistas, en general he seguido muy bien de qué iba el titulo que nos ocupa. Pero me queda la duda de que si hubiera leído antes “El Arco Iris” no hubiera podido entender mejor a los personajes y el porque actúan y piensan como lo hacen.
Y la conclusión de todo esto es que “Mujeres Enamoradas” ha sido una lectura tan agotadora que, de hecho, me ha dejo prácticamente a las puertas de un paron lector que sigo arrastrando, con ganas de estarme unos días sin leer nada, y mira que tengo mogollón de libros pendientes que me muero por empezar y que estoy convencida de que me van a encantar. Pero nada. Una situación triste, porque estaba convencida de que esta novela iba a gustarme mucho más. Pero mentiría si no dijera que prácticamente desde la página cincuenta me obligue a seguir con ella, motivo por el cual he avanzado con su lectura muy lenta y penosamente. Ha tenido momentos en los que la he disfrutado, sí, y por suerte no han sido pocos, pero durante una considerable parte del tiempo no he logrado conectar realmente con la historia y con sus personajes. No he logrado disfrutar con ella en muchos momentos, ni realmente engancharme a ella, ni nada. Y tengo que decir que me ha dado muchísima rabia y no solo por lo que comento más arriba. Porque no se puede negar que Lawrence escribe muy bien. Realmente bien.
Si hay algo que me ha gustado mucho es la manera en la que incide en la psicología de sus personajes, como va desarrollándola y trabajándola con mucha inteligencia e intensidad, sin dejar nunca de ser incisivo, desnudando sus almas delante del lector con todas sus luces y sus sombras, sin dejarse nada en el tintero. Y esto debe en gran parte de una de las cosas que más me gustado de este autor: la forma en que describe a sus personajes nunca es superficial y tampoco condescendiente. Les representa sin hacer juicios morales sobre ellos, sin prejuicios, sin juzgarles. Su forma de pensar, sus sentimientos y las consecuencias que tienen sus actos son lo que son y no hay nada más. Son personajes profundamente humanos, en ellos no hay nada al azar. Tanto su forma de ser como las relaciones que se establecen entre ellos no son nada tópicas ni cuadriculadas, como suele suceder en el mundo real.Dichos personajes no fueron concebidos para caer bien al publico, y Lawrence ni lo intenta. Muchas veces (la inmensa mayoría de las veces, para que mentir) me habría gustado mucho empatizar con ellos, pero me ha resultado del todo imposible. Había en ellos cosas que se me escapaban y que no acababa de comprender. No en pocas ocasiones me han resultado excesivamente escabrosos y laberínticos, profundamente egoístas y demasiado enfocados en sí mismos.No podía entender a qué se debía muchas de sus reacciones o de los sentimientos que profesaban. Pero, pese a todo, al mismo tiempo tengo que reconocer que esa es una de las gracias tanto de la novela como de los propios caracteres. Ver como van evolucionando y entender sus procesos mentales. Aunque muchas veces no los haya podido entender y me haya dado la impresión que se tratan de personajes que se dedican a pensar en muchas cosas y hacer poco, a su manera están tan bien construidos dentro de su lógica, que el lector puede entenderles a la perfección. Y no solo ocurre con los cuatro personajes principales, también pasa con los secundarios. Esto pasa, por ejemplo, con el padre de Gerald y con Hermione Crich, a quienes las riquezas y la fortuna social no les dan paz y felicidad.
Algo que me parece muy destacable es que aunque los cuatro miembros principales del elenco tienen la misma importancia y están igual de bien caracterizados, si hay quienes se llevan la palma son los personajes de Úrsula y Gudrum. Las dos hermanas no son protagonistas románticas tópicas para nada. Son mujeres de su tiempo, plenamente conscientes de su posición como hijas de un minero y de las dificultades y prejuicios a los que deben hacer frente por su condición femenina dentro de la sociedad eduardiana. No es que las dos deseen ser algo más que simples esposas o amantes. Es que están decididas a ser algo más. Las dos hermanas (con sus diferencias en cuanto a personalidades, metas y formas de pensar) son hijas de una concepción moderna del papel de la mujer, y dentro de la historia no se limitan a tener roles meramente pasivos y a suspirar por sus enamorados. Úrsula y Gudrum tendrán un papel tan decisivo en sus relaciones como Birkin y Gerald. Son unos personajes femeninos muy adelantados para su época, y ellas hay representada una fuerte carga feminista que se ve en varias ocasiones dentro de la obra. Como se ha dicho ya varias veces, Birkin y Gerald no les van a la zaga. Su amistad es también uno de los pilares sobre los que se cimienta esta lectura, tan llena de claroscuros como no están cualquiera de las otras relaciones que aparecen en las páginas de este libro. Tiene un fuerte componente homo erótico bastante bien desarrollado y muy perceptible, algo que reconozco que me ha sorprendido. Sabía que era una novela que se consideró muy escandalosa para la época, pero no me imaginaba que Lawrence hubiera ido más lejos que tratar la sexualidad desde una perspectiva heterosexual.
La forma de Lawrence de entender el amor me ha parecido preciosa y especial, porque no está para nada idealizada , y eso hace que la novela resulte poderosamente realista en todos sus sentidos. Gracias a esto “Mujeres Enamoradas” es una obra que sin ser romántica trate del amor. Y por ello resulto tan rádical para la época en que la novela fue publicada. El amor para Lawrence es algo que no tiene fronteras, que permite que dos personas sean ellas mismas de una forma individualizada, y a la vez puedan compenetrarse totalmente con la otra parte de la relación. La manera natural en que el amor es reflejado en esta novela se contrasta y complementa con la forma en que la sexualidad es representada. Ambos van de la mano, y aunque resulten tortuosos, no por ello hay que rechazarlos o quitarles importancia. La sexualidad es vista como una vía para que el ser humano pueda trascender sus propias limitaciones sensoriales y personales, una forma de derribar barreras y de conocerse a si mismo mucho mejor, de una forma más trascendental y profunda. Y de esta forma, Lawrence crea escuela al hacer que el amor y el deseo se conviertan en partes intrínsecas de las relaciones amorosas, que se encaucen por una senda no exenta de peligros y vericuetos, pero que puede llevar a conseguir un autoconocimiento más completo a juego con una gran satisfacción personal y la perfecta comunión intelectual y sentimental con el otro (cuando recuerdo que a Virginia Woolf y a los del Círculo de Bloomsbury Lawrence les parecia demasiado sensual para ser un buen escritor…no lo entiendo)
Y es que, criticas sociales y personajes perturbadores a parte, no he podido evitar sentir simpatía por Lawrence. Toda esta lectura rezuma un idealismo y una sensibilidad inmensas y una amplitud de miras que muchos de sus coetáneos podrían llegar a envidiar , y por todo esto su figura me ha resultado sorprendente conmovedora. No ha sido hasta después haber terminado “Mujeres Enamoradas” que busque información sobre la biografía de este autor. Y lo que leí no me sorprendió para nada. Ya no solo por haber descubierto como las circunstancias en las que nació y vivío, y su propia personalidad compleja marcaron su bibliografía (o por lo menos el libro que nos ocupa, que ya os he dicho que ha sido el primero que leo de él). Toda esta novela, para mí, de principio a fin ha estado impregnada por una atmósfera de desarraigo y de búsqueda de un lugar en el mundo que he comprendido y asimilado perfectamente después de haber sabido más cosas sobre la biografía y personalidad de Lawrence.
Sé con seguridad que no va a ser la última incursión que vaya a hacer en la prosa de D.H. Lawrence (me pica la curiosidad y me siento, en cierta forma, obligada a leer “El Arco Iris” cuando pueda. Y tengo desde hace mucho tiempo cogiendo polvo en mis estanterías el polémico y celebre “El Amante de Lady Chatterley”). Pero espero que una vez que ya me he metido dentro de su mundo tan complejo, pese a lo que pueda parecer a simple vista, y ya sepa a qué atenerme, estas lecturas me gusten mucho más y pueda conectar mejor con ellas y apreciar a este autor como creo que realmente se merece. Ojalá.
February 14, 2024
"You've got to take down the love-and-marriage ideal from its pedestal. We want something broader. --I believe in the *additional* perfect relationship between man and man--additional to marriage."
I'd always wanted to read this Lawrence novel... and now I have. It's an odd reading experience overall, but I suppose I understand it better as a world-weary adult than I might have if I'd read it years ago. I wouldn't call it an easy read, as much of it - in particular the male-female conversations (the central four characters) seem at odds with credulity. Would anyone anywhere really talk this way, in such almost-non-stop philosophical / psychological terms? For the most part - and even though the two don't take the sexual route that one of them desires - it's really only the male conversations that seem rooted in reality and sense. We're led to the conclusion that male-female relationships, as viewed by Lawrence, are daunting things indeed... fragile, valuable but insufficient, and it's only sheer happenstance if they take off. More than that, though, is the novel's view that life itself is wanting, mechanical, and a mere shadow of what it could be. And love is too often caged.
That said, there's much to admire in the novel and many of the peripheral scenes are memorably laid-out and well-written. I came to like the main character of Birkin - even if his philosophy is overly ambitious and impractical, he handles himself in an amusing-enough manner to serve as a realist. The woman who takes to him - Ursula - ultimately seems a reasonable mate; though, like her sister Gudrun, she is shown as a vortex of emotion and contradiction. Unlike Ursula, Gudrun has few quiet or genuine moments and grows (inexplicably) into the image of a conniving shrew, set out to destroy the man (Gerald) she was happy enough to blissfully fall for. Like Gudrun, Gerald is something of a question mark, though he mostly comes off as a solid sort of man who gets things done, even if he doesn't allow himself to be understood well and is unsure of how to navigate his emotions.
[The edition I read is not the one shown here, but the complete Penguin edition.]
August 24, 2018
I disliked almost every page of this book. I don't understand how it can be on both the Boxall 1001 and the Guardian 1000 lists. That combination is usually a winner for me. If I don't personally enjoy the book, I can at least see the merit. Not so here. It was simultaneously dull and preposterous. All the characters argued like they were first year know-it-all university students. All the characters were constantly overwhelmed by feelings of fear and hatred because they felt like some other character was attacking them personally by their very presence. The dialogue was incomprehensible, and the characters seemed utterly unreal. I know there is something to be said for the observation that most people don't listen very well, they are too busy preparing what they are going to say next. But the characters in this book did not listen very well because they were too
busy internally constructing the other person's real agenda.
Character A: "Nice weather, isn't it?"
Character B: Why does A say that? The weather is spoiled now! A is always trying to oppress me! It is ever so hateful!
(Not a real example, but I couldn't be bothered to look up actual dialogue. The internal monologues of fear and loathing tend to run over multiple pages as well, before character B says something like "Isn't it just," but with such cold indifference that character A embarks on an internal monologue about how Character B terrifies them by their sheer masculinity/femininity/enigma/presence/whatever.)
The title was a complete misnomer. The women weren't in love so much as preoccupied with whether or not the men loved them. The men loved no one as much as each other. A better title for the book would be: Men in Love: An Unfulfilled Bromance.
busy internally constructing the other person's real agenda.
Character A: "Nice weather, isn't it?"
Character B: Why does A say that? The weather is spoiled now! A is always trying to oppress me! It is ever so hateful!
(Not a real example, but I couldn't be bothered to look up actual dialogue. The internal monologues of fear and loathing tend to run over multiple pages as well, before character B says something like "Isn't it just," but with such cold indifference that character A embarks on an internal monologue about how Character B terrifies them by their sheer masculinity/femininity/enigma/presence/whatever.)
The title was a complete misnomer. The women weren't in love so much as preoccupied with whether or not the men loved them. The men loved no one as much as each other. A better title for the book would be: Men in Love: An Unfulfilled Bromance.
June 22, 2021
Prin acțiunea și dialogul personajelor cărții, Lawrence explorează teme mari: dihotomiile umanității și naturii, masculin și feminin, intelectualism și spontaneitate, așteptări sociale și dorințe individuale.
"- Dar nu poți înlătura cu totul spiritul competitiv, spuse Gerald. Este unul dintre stimulentele necesare producției și progresului."
"- Norme? Nu. Urăsc normele. Ele sînt totuși necesare oamenilor de rînd. Cînd ești cineva poți să fii tu însuți și să faci ceea ce-ți place."
"- Dar nu poți înlătura cu totul spiritul competitiv, spuse Gerald. Este unul dintre stimulentele necesare producției și progresului."
"- Norme? Nu. Urăsc normele. Ele sînt totuși necesare oamenilor de rînd. Cînd ești cineva poți să fii tu însuți și să faci ceea ce-ți place."
July 8, 2008
This book is like an Expressionist painting: you look at it once, and return and see something different. The writing is lush, and almost poetic at times. Lawrence uses the idea of the two sisters, Gudrun and Ursula, as his canvas to explore ideas about men and women, marriage and fidelity, and whatever else runs through his mind and on to the page.
In this high-speed, instant world, we are losing the art of leisurely contemplation. D.H. Lawrence needs to be taken up, and put down, and taken up again. Forget about the criticisms of misogyny/adoration of women, eroticism/not erotic enough, too frou-frou /too manly. Just let the language wash over you and enjoy the experience.
In this high-speed, instant world, we are losing the art of leisurely contemplation. D.H. Lawrence needs to be taken up, and put down, and taken up again. Forget about the criticisms of misogyny/adoration of women, eroticism/not erotic enough, too frou-frou /too manly. Just let the language wash over you and enjoy the experience.
March 5, 2008
It is seemingly impossible to summarize a book such as Women in Love. The book innocuously begins with sisters Gudrun and Ursula Brangwen discussing marriage. Gudrun is an artist and Ursula is a school teacher, and their middle-class status is key in their ostracism from the high-society to which their lovers Geraldthe industrialistand Rupertthe disillusioned intellectual. Although these relationships would seem to be key, the complex relationship between Rupertmodeled after author D.H. Lawrenceand Gerald is really the crux of the novel.
Further summarization seems impossible, because this novel seems to be not so much a novel, but rather a vehicle for Lawrence to espouse his philosophies through the character of Birkin. Birkin rants and raves about everything from the nature of love and marriage to the overly structured education system, the cruelty of labor (Lawrence's father was a coal miner) and the structure of the English empire. Although there are many remarkable scenes of dialogue, these are interrupted by philosophical musings, and the two strands do not blend together well. Reading this book is arduous, and it is a novel that operates on so many different levels that it would be best discussed rather than read solitarily.
Readers may be shocked by the overwhelming misogyny and Eurocentrism of much of the novelaspects that do not translate time. Lawrence explores sexuality in a way that is often disparaging to women while equating men with Adonis. A provocative novel, that I love/hate, this read will make you want to know more about Lawrence (which may be key to understanding his motivations) and hopefully read some of his other work.
Further summarization seems impossible, because this novel seems to be not so much a novel, but rather a vehicle for Lawrence to espouse his philosophies through the character of Birkin. Birkin rants and raves about everything from the nature of love and marriage to the overly structured education system, the cruelty of labor (Lawrence's father was a coal miner) and the structure of the English empire. Although there are many remarkable scenes of dialogue, these are interrupted by philosophical musings, and the two strands do not blend together well. Reading this book is arduous, and it is a novel that operates on so many different levels that it would be best discussed rather than read solitarily.
Readers may be shocked by the overwhelming misogyny and Eurocentrism of much of the novelaspects that do not translate time. Lawrence explores sexuality in a way that is often disparaging to women while equating men with Adonis. A provocative novel, that I love/hate, this read will make you want to know more about Lawrence (which may be key to understanding his motivations) and hopefully read some of his other work.
June 4, 2025
D.H. Lawrence es un escritor hecho a sí mismo, su historia familiar extraña, combinando la rudeza de un minero, su padre, y la sensibilidad de su madre, una maestra con sueños frustrados, todo este bagaje es materia prima para sus libros, a partir de ella construye historias complejas.
Esta obra publicada en 1920, tiene como personajes principales a las jóvenes hermanas Úrsula y Gudrun, dos jóvenes de clase media baja, que a base de tozudez son maestras, y una de ellas además pinta, se asume que han vivido en Londres, por lo que se les nota un poco incómodas en este pueblo minero de su infancia.
Hay muchos factores que destacan para romper con ese tema inglés sobre jóvenes casaderas, que son fieles a su familia y que ponderan los modales por encima de todo. Estás hermanas tienen un entendimiento casi nulo con sus padres, forzadas a vivir en casa paterna por no contar con medios propios, aunado a ello no piensan en casarse, su meta es dedicarse a su oficio, vivir en una ciudad más grande y disfrutar de los pequeños placeres.
Pero el equilibrio femenino se rompe cuando dos jóvenes amigos de clase alta, cada uno con una personalidad opuesta pero complementaria, se enamoran de las hermanas y empiezan un asedio para conquistarlas, aún cuando todo parece ir en contra de este deseo.
Se analizan varios temas, como la amistad masculina en un nivel tan profundo e íntimo que parece casi ser una bella utopía, las obsesiones como catalizadores de acontecimientos imprevistos y dolorosos.
Se plantea una disyuntiva que pocas veces se ha explorado en la literatura, que pasa si la joven bella, inteligente pero pobre, no acepta al guapo, millonario,, sensible pretendiente, hay realmente un margen de maniobra, en este caso puntual parece una historia de amor pero conforme vamos leyendo se van dando pistas de la presión histórica que se ejerce en la joven de manera sutil y continuada, sin casi sentirlo va siendo conducida a un destino no elegido, entonces cuando todo parece consumado y aceptado, que pasaría si intentará. escaparse de esa red.
“Ignoraba qué era lo que atentaba en su interior, pero la sola idea del amor, del matrimonio, de los hijos y de una vida compartida en la horrible intimidad de la satisfacción doméstica y conyugal, le repelía.”
También aparece un amor atípico,, cuyo fundamento parece ser la razón y el entendimiento entre dos seres distintos pero conscientes que logran a través de sus dudas y enfrentamientos encontrar el sentido de la vida en el otro, aún sin buscarlo.
“Quiero una extraña conjunción contigo, no un simple encuentro, ni un trato, sino un equilibrio, un puro equilibrio de dos seres, tal como las estrellas se equilibran entre sí.”
Me gusta como construye las escenas puede pasar de un paseo en un río con picnic incluido donde podemos sentir el pasto fresco, el sabor de los sándwiches, oír la risa de los enamorados, y de repente pasar a un momento de terror y zozobra, es realmente digno de mencionar.
Admiro el tono del libro, aún cuando el tema principal son las relaciones humanas, se da tiempo para criticar la industrialización, las clases sociales y la violencia del ser humano como forma de dominación.
Me parece que la escritura de Lawrence es muy expresiva, parece luminosa, sin ataduras, mostrando el mundo desde otra perspectiva, siendo libre sin limitaciones auto impuestas, mas no libertina como los ingleses trataron de encasillarla para que no fuera leída y pudiera ser una fuente donde se pudiera beber de otras formas de ver la vida, no peores, quizá sí mejores pero seguramente distintas.
Esta obra publicada en 1920, tiene como personajes principales a las jóvenes hermanas Úrsula y Gudrun, dos jóvenes de clase media baja, que a base de tozudez son maestras, y una de ellas además pinta, se asume que han vivido en Londres, por lo que se les nota un poco incómodas en este pueblo minero de su infancia.
Hay muchos factores que destacan para romper con ese tema inglés sobre jóvenes casaderas, que son fieles a su familia y que ponderan los modales por encima de todo. Estás hermanas tienen un entendimiento casi nulo con sus padres, forzadas a vivir en casa paterna por no contar con medios propios, aunado a ello no piensan en casarse, su meta es dedicarse a su oficio, vivir en una ciudad más grande y disfrutar de los pequeños placeres.
Pero el equilibrio femenino se rompe cuando dos jóvenes amigos de clase alta, cada uno con una personalidad opuesta pero complementaria, se enamoran de las hermanas y empiezan un asedio para conquistarlas, aún cuando todo parece ir en contra de este deseo.
Se analizan varios temas, como la amistad masculina en un nivel tan profundo e íntimo que parece casi ser una bella utopía, las obsesiones como catalizadores de acontecimientos imprevistos y dolorosos.
Se plantea una disyuntiva que pocas veces se ha explorado en la literatura, que pasa si la joven bella, inteligente pero pobre, no acepta al guapo, millonario,, sensible pretendiente, hay realmente un margen de maniobra, en este caso puntual parece una historia de amor pero conforme vamos leyendo se van dando pistas de la presión histórica que se ejerce en la joven de manera sutil y continuada, sin casi sentirlo va siendo conducida a un destino no elegido, entonces cuando todo parece consumado y aceptado, que pasaría si intentará. escaparse de esa red.
“Ignoraba qué era lo que atentaba en su interior, pero la sola idea del amor, del matrimonio, de los hijos y de una vida compartida en la horrible intimidad de la satisfacción doméstica y conyugal, le repelía.”
También aparece un amor atípico,, cuyo fundamento parece ser la razón y el entendimiento entre dos seres distintos pero conscientes que logran a través de sus dudas y enfrentamientos encontrar el sentido de la vida en el otro, aún sin buscarlo.
“Quiero una extraña conjunción contigo, no un simple encuentro, ni un trato, sino un equilibrio, un puro equilibrio de dos seres, tal como las estrellas se equilibran entre sí.”
Me gusta como construye las escenas puede pasar de un paseo en un río con picnic incluido donde podemos sentir el pasto fresco, el sabor de los sándwiches, oír la risa de los enamorados, y de repente pasar a un momento de terror y zozobra, es realmente digno de mencionar.
Admiro el tono del libro, aún cuando el tema principal son las relaciones humanas, se da tiempo para criticar la industrialización, las clases sociales y la violencia del ser humano como forma de dominación.
Me parece que la escritura de Lawrence es muy expresiva, parece luminosa, sin ataduras, mostrando el mundo desde otra perspectiva, siendo libre sin limitaciones auto impuestas, mas no libertina como los ingleses trataron de encasillarla para que no fuera leída y pudiera ser una fuente donde se pudiera beber de otras formas de ver la vida, no peores, quizá sí mejores pero seguramente distintas.
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