THE BOOK PAGE

In association with Winstone’s Bookshop

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 (suggestionsof 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, dealingwith 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 Get 10% off these books at Winstone’s

when you show this copy of Wriggle Valley Magazine or call or e mail using the code WVM10 8 Cheap St., Sherborne, DT9 3PX. tel: 01935 816128 e: winstonebooks1@gmail.com www.winstonebooks.co.uk

600 NEW BOOKS APPEARED LAST MONTH! HERE’S 5 OF THE BEST Raynor Winn: The Wild Silence

Michael Joseph 14.99. The follow up to the Costa-shortlisted ‘The Salt Path’.Along with more visits to the Lake District, the Peak District, and Skye, Winn touchingly records how she and her degeneratively ill husband Moth take on a free farm tenancy.

Helen Macdonald: Vesper Flights Jonathan Cape 16.99

A Radio 4 Book of the Week. Macdonald, a Samuel Johnson Prize and Costa Book of the Yearaward winner with ‘H is for Hawk’, delivers a triumphant blendingof observation and poignant memory.

Hilary Mantel: Mantel Pieces,

HarperCollins £16.99. Is Mantel now too ubiquitous to have on your bookshelf? Not on the evidence of this decade-spanningcollection of reviews, essays and memoir. Insightful, irrestibly witty writing.

Richard Osman - Thursday Murder Club

Viking £14.99. The TV quiz-meister’s debut book has been garlanded with 5 star reviews. Strewn with witty one liners, four octogenarian friends turn sleuths to solve a murder. Cunningly constructed and funny throughout.

William Dalrymple: The Anarchy The Relentless Rise of the East India

Company Bloomsbury £10.99. This brilliant ‘Times History Book of the Year’ is nowout in paperback. The East India Company’s mercenary rise to power makes the modern day anticsof Trump and Bolsonaro seem benign.

The Rural Reader What’s in a name? A series on the origin of Wriggle Valley Village Names Number 1. Melbury Bubb

Melbury derives from the Old English 'maele' and 'burh,' an approximate meaning is 'many coloured fortified place,’ suggesting a site for defence in battles fought long ago. The manorial addition of Bubb, to distinguish this Melbury from Melburys Osmond and Sampford, is thought to come from either the Lords of the Manor in mediaeval times or a Saxon named Bubba, who lived there prior to the Norman Conquest.

AmistyMelburyBubb

pic:JennieGreenwood It has been suggested that the carvings on the font of St Mary (15th/19th C) in Melbury Bubb are upside down. Not so, they are the right way up. It’s the font that’s upside down, being an upturned Saxon cross. A fact which has been known to nonpluss the odd specialist writer on matters architectural.