Women In Love

Written by D. H. Lawrence

Narrated by Cril Taylor-Carr and The Cliff

Women in Love (1920) is a novel by English author D. H. Lawrence. It is a sequel to his earlier novel The Rainbow (1915), and follows 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. Lawrence contrasts this pair with the love that develops between Ursula Brangwen and Rupert Birkin, an alienated intellectual who articulates many opinions associated with the author. The emotional relationships thus established are given further depth and tension by an intense psychological and physical attraction between Gerald and Rupert.

The novel ranges over the whole of British society before the time of the First World War and eventually concludes in the snows of the Tyrolean Alps. Ursula's character draws 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. David Herbert.

Lawrence was an English writer, novelist, poet and essayist. His works reflect on modernity, industrialization, sexuality, emotional health, vitality, spontaneity and instinct..

• Language: English
• Publisher: Icon Audio Arts
• Release date: May 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9798887674285

D. H. Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence was born on 11th September 1881 in Eastwood, a small mining village in Nottinghamshire, in the English Midlands. Despite ill health as a child and a comparatively disadvantageous position in society, he became a teacher in 1908, and took up a post in a school in Croydon, south of London. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1911, and from then until his death he wrote feverishly, producing poetry, novels, essays, plays travel books and short stories, while travelling around the world, settling for periods in Italy, New Mexico and Mexico. He married Frieda Weekley in 1914 and died of tuberculosis in 1930.

Reviews for Women In Love

[andy5185 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This novel explores the lives and loves of the Brangwen sisters as introduced in the previous work The Rainbow. (You don't have to read The Rainbow first.) This is an exquisitely written story that questions and examines the roles men and women play in their lives and with each other. The wider societal expectations are also addressed. Scholars say Lawrence was trying to show the ill effects of industrialization on the psyche, but for my early 20's mind it was simply a drama-filled story about complicated people and relationships. It totally turned me on to Modernist literature.

[pilgrimjess · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

"Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world to fit yourself."Women in Love is the sequel to The Rainbow and follows sisters Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen struggle to balance independence, love, and marriage at the beginning of the twentieth century but I don't believe that it is absolutely necessary to read it's predecessor before tackling this book. I didn't. Ursula and Gudren are in their late twenties and have established independent and comfortable lives with their fairly liberal parents in an anonymous mining town in the Midlands. Ursula is a schoolteacher whilst Gudrun is a sculptor who has recently returned from London. Gudren does a little teaching at the school but finds her home-town dull and claustrophobic until Gerald Crich, a handsome mining heir, catches her eye. Meanwhile Ursula finds herself captivated by Gerald's best friend Rupert Birkin.Rupert loves Gerald but neither men can envisage an enduring relationship between two men. The two of them have a naked wrestling match but whilst each man admires the other physical attributes it goes nowhere. In many respects the title of this book is a bit of a misnomer as it is soon becomes apparent that neither woman are in love rather this is a novel that explores psychological drama between the sexes looking at feelings and thought processes through sensual language. Lawrence is however, also making a social commentary with this novel; the meaning of love in particular how the two differing sexes view it, intellectualism and nature, the need for social reform in regards to societal expectations versus individual sentiments and the desire/ aversion for marriage. This is certainly not an easy read. Firstly I don't agree with the author's views on marriage (I have been married to the same woman for over thirty years which may colour my views) whilst some of the long philosophical sections of the text were tedious at best. Yet every time I decided to read one more chapter before throwing in the towel I would find myself being drawn into the plot again and the conclusion was both unexpected and dramatic. I am glad that I have finally gotten around to reading it but it is not a book that I am likely to revisit.

[danielstj · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was a great novel by Lawrence. He managed to convey so much with his words and some passages are elegant, graceful, and wonderful in their bearing. The characters are complex, multifaceted, and intriguing and the plot is never stale or boring. This is one to read if you enjoy classics, by all means. It's totally worth it.4 stars!

[dreesie-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I didn't find this book exactly bad, per se, it's just another character-driven novel (I prefer plot-driven, personally). But I won't say it's well written either. It's kind of a hot mess, honestly. Darkness! Loins! Love! Hate! Indecision! Sneaking! Unhappiness! Indecisiveness! And did I mention Darkness? Various plot lines lead nowhere--what is the point, exactly, since there isn't even an overarching plot that needs a bit of info to work.This book is so obviously intended to have symbolic meaning. Of what, exactly, I can't say, but there is lots of darkness and then green, when Birkin and Ursula sneak and spend the night in the woods, as an example. What does Hermione represent? And the sisters both being teachers? And Winifred? (And how old is Winifred? 10? 13? 17?). Honestly this reads more like a YA book to me, and i am so glad I didn't read it in an academic lit class, because I am terrible with hidden meanings etc. Though if I had read this in high school English, I can guarantee my friends and I would have jokes about it even now, 30 years later (like Piggy being crushed by the styrofoam rock in the movie version of Lord of the Flies).So anyway, it's done. I am a little curious about the precursor, as I found Ursula and Gudrun's stories to be interesting. Single sisters in their mid/late 20s still living at home while both being teachers, and their dad was too? Shouldn't he be trying to marry them off or something? So much of this book struck me as unusual--maybe it wasn't, but I guess I have not read or studied a lot about early 0th century England. So maybe it's me.

[enockpioulle · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Great writing that drags forever, making it a strong contestant for the most boring novel ever by a notoriously famous author. Before you even think of it, look somewhere else, unless it's a mandatory read-for-school assignment. What was somehow my case. Later in life I might try "Sons and lovers" and once more "Lady Lady Chatterley's Lover".

[garrison0550 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I keep this book out in my workshop now. Whenever I need to get wood glue off my fingers I just rip out a page.

[tommi180744 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very disappointing!For an alleged breakthrough masterpiece of the era it seems to lack most of the literary elements that would justify the claims made for Women In Love.If Lawrence seriously believed the conversational chat-up monologues he produces in this book won the affection of females then not only were they women of an altogether different era (granted), but surely of a near alien species who were attracted to dry, insipid meandering thoughts of conceited, self-absorbed near dead in mind and body males.The 2 relationships were very unconvincing: the hints of sensuality that so engaged and enraged many when WINL was first published whilst understandable for the period make for dull reading today. Others of the author's period covered much more effectively such topics as human desire and the excited body.I suppose I also resented that this was written by an author who flunked any participation in the grief-strewn, human calamity of WW1: And it shows in his writing - the violence between leading characters, both mental and physical, is of a high-brow taste that no one having experienced the frontline or even a staff post in gay Paris could possibly describe in so tediously drawn out scenes that had 'false premise' at their core. Much of its description of the main characters is not insightful but incredulous for its lack of perception of the human personality.Lawrence was a gifted novelist and wrote some very fine works: I have to disagree with so many others and declare this was definitely not one of them!

[jvioland_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

A disappointing read. It is disjointed and does not flow well. A possibly repressed homosexuality (or is it normal masculine sensuality?) pervades the book. Too contrived to work.

[gbill_7 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Lawrence wrote Women in Love as a sequel to The Rainbow, continuing on with the story of the Brangwen sisters Ursula and Gudrun. It picks up where he left off, with the sisters in their mid-twenties, and Gudrun asking Ursula if she truly does not want to get married and have children. Soon both are involved with men, Ursula with intellectual school inspector Rupert Birkin and Gudrun with an heir to a coal-mine, Gerald Crich. Lawrence was a bitter man when he wrote the book, following censorship of The Rainbow and the deepening of the atrocities in WWI. Women in Love is darker and less optimistic as a result, and the alienated Birkin is widely held to represent Lawrence. The relationships of both couples are stormy to say the least, and as with Lawrence’s other books, sexual desire, subconscious forces, and the dark side of the relationship between men and women is on full display. He is also open about homosexual desire, this time between men, which apparently reflected his own apparent real-life romance with a farmer while writing the book. At his best, Lawrence creates scenes which last in the reader’s memory. For me the best of these in Women in Love was when Ursula and Birkin are out for a drive and pull over to have a giant fight, pause briefly as a bicyclist pedals by, and then resume to have her throwing his gift of three rings into his face and walking off down the road. At his worst, Lawrence is too heavy in his prose and in his cynicism; a lighter touch here would have been more effective.Quotes:On brotherhood:“Your democracy is an absolute lie – your brotherhood of man is a pure falsity, if you apply it further than the mathematical abstraction. We all drank milk first, we all eat bread and meat, we all want to ride in motor-cars – therein lies the beginning and the end of the brotherhood of man. But no equality.”On childhood:“Oh God, could one bear it, this past which was gone down the abyss? Could she bear, that it ever had been! She looked round this silent, upper world of snow and stars and powerful cold. There was another world, like views on a magic lantern: the Marsh, Cossethay, Ilkeston, lit up with a common, unreal light. There was a shadowy, unreal Ursula, a whole shadow-play of an unreal life. It was as unreal, and circumscribed, as a magic-lantern show. She wished the slides could all be broken. She wished it could be gone for ever, like a lantern-slide which is broken. She wanted to have no past. She wanted to have come down from the slopes of heaven to this place, with Birkin, not to have toiled out of the murk of her childhood and her upbringing, slowly, all soiled.”On death:“But the great, dark illimitable kingdom of death, there humanity was put to scorn. So much they could do upon earth, the multifarious little gods that they were. But the kingdom of death put them all to scorn, they dwindled into their true vulgar silliness in face of it.”On knowledge:“If I know about the flower, don’t I lose the flower and have only the knowledge? Aren’t we exchanging the substance for the shadow, aren’t we forfeiting life for this dead quantity of knowledge? And what does it mean to me, after all? What does all this knowledge mean to me? It means nothing.”On love, and solitude:“At the very last, one is alone, beyond the influence of love. 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.”On life:“…how known it all was, like a game with the figures set out, the same figures, the Queen of chess, the knights, the pawns, the same now as they were hundreds of years ago, the same figures moving round in one of the innumerable permutations that make up the game. But the game is known, its going on is like a madness, it is so exhausted.”And this one, which I love:“She thought of the Marsh, the old, intimate farm-life at Cossethay. My God, how far was she projected from her childhood, how far was she still to go! In one life-time one travelled through aeons. The great chasm of memory, from her childhood in the intimate country surroundings of Cossethay and the Marsh Farm – she remembered the servant Tillly, who used to give her bread and butter sprinkled with brown sugar, in the old living-room where the grandfather clock had two pink roses in a basked painted above the figures on the face – and now, when she was travelling into the unknown with Birkin, an utter stranger – was so great, that it seemed she had no identity, that the child she had been, playing in Cossethay churchyard, was a little creature of history, not really herself.”On rambling:“At moments it seemed to him he did not care a straw whether Ursula or Hermione or anybody else existed or did not exist. Why bother! Why strive for a coherent, satisfied life? Why not drift on in a series of accidents – like a picaresque novel? Why not? Why bother about human relationships? Why take them seriously – male or female? Why form any serious questions at all? Why not be casual, drifting along, taking all for what it was worth?”

[yogiabb_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I just finished "Women in Love" by D.H. Lawrence. It was written in 1920 and is set in the early 1910's, before the first World War, and concerns the lives of two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen who live in a small coal mining town in England. Gudren, who is an artist, falls in love with Robert Crich, a businessman. Ursula falls in love with Robert Birkin, an intellectual. A good summary of the book is here. The book is about relationships, between men and women, and between men.The book has a racy reputation but it is very tame by modern standards. It was banned in Britain for 11 years after its publication.My impression of the book is that it is a torrent of words, a regular Niagara Falls. Lawrence sets up the various scenes completely including the emotional state of the parties involved and then puts the scene in motion. I thought he was great at picking out the nuances of a relationship, from deep attraction, to mild irritation and of describing how people in a group interact. He set up some scenes that seemed fairly innocuous and then suddenly something happens, a punch is thrown, a horse kicks up, somebody drowns. To do all this requires the deluge of words, words of all types. I read the book on my Kindle because it is free and that was handy because of the built in dictionary.I enjoyed the book but it is not light reading. The information density in the prose is thick and if you don't pay attention to it then the subsequents scenes don't make much sense. Anyways, I'm glad that I read it and can now tick it off my life TBR list and I don't think that I'll be reading much more of his stuff. I am not smart enough.

[bookwoman247 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Women in Love is the story of the Brangwen sisters who are very different in their approaches to life and relationships. The novel centers on Ursula's relationship with Birkin and Gudrun's relationship with Gerald Crich, son of the owner of the town's coal mine.This is my first foray into Lawrence's work, and it will not be my last! In spite of the angst and over-analytical tendencies, it is the most lush, sumptuous writing I've ever had the pleasure to read. I loved it!

[uhhlanna · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The first Lawrence novel I read--the characters aren't that fantastic, but his writing style is really gripping and impressive, so I enjoyed it! I felt sophisticated when I recognized his allusions to the pyschological or theoretical realms.

[ttaisi5editor · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Just about anything by Lawrence is worth reading, and that's true of "Women in Love," too. But if you're just starting up with Lawrence, then start with "Sons and Lovers."

[luli81_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The best book I probably will ever read. I think I fell in love with Lawrence and his ideas. Am I sick?

[bookomaniac-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Tragisch verhaal over de onmogelijkheid tot echte liefde: Birkin en Ursula blijken een succesrelatie, maar niet volledig, Gerald en Ursula mislukken. Beetje high brow, maar zeer rijk en coherenter dan Rainbow. Vooral introspectie in vrouw/man-zijn. Soms rare zijsprongetjes

[shannan79 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

While this book had no plot, It basically described and question many types of love. I found the language beautiful but hard to understand at times. Basically its about tow sister Ursula and Gudrun. Ursula falls for Birkin and he asks her to marry him. Meanwhile Gerald and Birkin have an intimate affair with each other. This book was probably banned because of the homosexuality in the novel. Lawrence can be bold and sometimes offensively sexual for his era.I really did not like this book because it jumped around a lot. I was told that I would have probably would have like it if I had The Rainbow first. The best part of this novel would have to be the end because it was shocking I had to reread the last chapter to get over my shock.

[bexaplex · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Women in Love is incredibly morose. Since Lawrence leaves the war out of the story (although the book was written during the Great War) the characters' lassitude and hopelessness is totally unexplained. I can't think of why I've kept this book so long, since reading it is like spending a dinner party with an unhappy drunk. Perhaps I thought the moroseness was deep?

[sadiebooks_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

one of lawrence's best. i read it before lady chatterley's lover and kind of liked it better.

[hera_7 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Ghastly. Really.

[justmerosalie · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I don't remember what this book is about except somebody wanders off into the mountains to die. Maybe I read it at an inexperienced age. But it was very disappointing because Lawrence's SONS AND LOVERS had been such an intimate and poignant experience. There some books I go back to and re-read to get a new take on because years have passed since I read them, but this isn't one of them.