Women in Love picks up the story of the Brangwen sisters a decade after The Rainbow left off, but the gentle searching of that earlier novel has hardened into something wilder, more desperate. Ursula, now a schoolteacher in a coal-black Midlands mining town, and Gudrun, fresh from art school in London, drift toward two men who could not be more different: Rupert Birkin, a brooding intellectual who speaks in feverish abstractions about consciousness and freedom, and Gerald Crich, a handsome industrialist whose grip on life is as mechanical as the mines he owns. What begins as a dialectic about love and independence becomes something far more dangerous, as Lawrence traces the way desire can annihilate even as it fulfills, how the need to merge with another soul can curdle into possession. The novel burns with an almost unbearable tension between minds that cannot quite reach each other, bodies that attract and destroy, and a society whose certainties are crumbling even before the Great War arrives to finish the job. The climactic Alpine chapters, where Gerald walks alone into the snow, represent Lawrence at his most uncompromising: love is not salvation but a field of battle, and the price of genuine feeling is the possibility of annihilation.
