Women in Love
1920
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.
Editions
X-Ray
“But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.””
— D. H. Lawrence
“I should feel the air move against me, and feel the things I touched, instead of having only to look at them. I'm sure life is all wrong because it has become much too visual - we can neither hear nor feel nor understand, we can only see. I'm sure that is entirely wrong.””
— D. H. Lawrence
“Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself. ””
— D. H. Lawrence
“That’s the place to get to”
— D. H. Lawrence
“Every true artist is the salvation of every other. Only artists produce for each other a world that is fit to live in.””
— D. H. Lawrence
“I want us to be together without bothering about ourselves- to be really together because we ARE together, as if it were a phenomenon, not a thing we have to maintain by our own effort.””
— D. H. Lawrence
“Don't you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?””
— D. H. Lawrence
“And all the time she felt the reflection of his hopelessness in her. She couldn't quite, quite love in hoplessness. And he, being hopeless, couldn't ever love at all.””
— D. H. Lawrence
“And woman is the same as horses: two wills act in opposition inside her. With one will she wants to subject herself utterly. With the other she wants to bolt, and pitch her rider to perdition.””
— D. H. Lawrence
