The Book Page
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LAWRENCE’S WOMEN IN LOVE WAS PUBLISHED 100 YEARS AGO. WHY READ IT TODAY? Written at a time of violent social and political upheaval, Women in Love continued to explore ideas found in the autobiographical Sons and Lovers (1913). Lawrence was persuaded to divide into two his original concept of ‘The Sisters’, an ambitious, 900 page novel ranging over three generations of the Brangwen family. Women in Love (1920) evolved as the sequel to The Rainbow, published in 1915 and immediately banned for alleged obscenity (suggestions of same sex relationships) or for anti- militarism, or perhaps a combination of the two. The Rainbow introduces us to Tom Brangwen, a farmer, and records his troubled courting of and marriage to a Polish widow, Lydia. Her daughter Anna later marries William, the son of Tom’s brother and it is their daughter, Ursula, who becomes the focus of the book, dealing with her love affairs, first with a soldier, Anton Skrebensky, and then with a local teacher, Winifred Inger. Women in Love continues the story of Ursula and her younger sister Gudrun, now free thinking schoolteachers set in a relatively comfortable middle class milieu. It explores Ursula’s relationship with Rupert Birkin (a partly autobiographical character) and Gudrun’s
with the troubled and repressed Gerald Cricht, son of the wealthy local mine owner. Whereas, tonally, The Rainbow is poetic and soulful, Women in Love, the more expansive and peripatetic novel, is more social and wordly.
Lawrence: smoking jacket, smouldering prose..
What still resonates today is his masterly handling of human conflict: between men and women; between powers - Birkin’s (Lawrence’s) disillusionment can be better understood when the devastation of WW1 is taken into account; between corporatism and workforce; between organized religion and individualism; and, dominantly, between classes: the aristocratic, the middle, the bohemian and the working. Lawrence was once described by one biographer as a man who made a religion out of his emotions. It’s perhaps fairer to say he made conflicting emotions into an art.
Lawrence’s novels and some of his essays and poetry are available in Penguin
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