Women in Love
Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen are two sisters living in the Midlands of England in the 1910s. Ursula is a teacher, Gudrun an artist. They meet two men who live nearby, Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich. The four become friends. Ursula begins to date Birkin and Gudrun eventually begins a love affair with Gerald.
All four are deeply concerned with questions of society, politics, and the relationship between men and women. At a party at Gerald's manor house, Gerald's sister, Diana, drowns. Gudrun becomes the teacher and mentor of his youngest sister. Soon Gerald's coal-mine-owning father passes away as well after a drawn-out illness.
Birkin asks Ursula to marry him, and she agrees. Gerald and Gudrun's relationship, however, becomes stormy. The four vacation in the Alps. Gudrun begins an intense friendship with Loerke, a physically puny but emotionally commanding artist. Gerald, seeing in Loerke the embodiment of all he hates, chooses to end his own life.
Women in Love was origionally published out of New York City in a limited run, available only to subscribers; this was due to the controversy caused by his previous work,
The Rainbow.Screenwriter and producer
Stanley Kramer and director
Ken Russell adapted the novel in the
Academy Award-winning
film in
1969 (for which
Glenda Jackson won for
Best Actress). It was one of the first theatrical movies to show male genitals, when Gerald Crich (
Oliver Reed) and Rupert Birkin (
Alan Bates) wrestle in the nude in front of a roaring fireplace.
*
Women in Love (New York: Privately Printed by Thomas Seltzer, 1920).
*
Women in Love (London: Martin Seeker, 1921).
*
Women in Love, ed. Charles L. Ross (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1982).
*
Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). This edition is a volume in
The Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D H Lawrence*
Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen [with an Introduction and Notes by Mark Kinkead-Weekes] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995).
*
Women in Love, ed.David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
*
The First Women in Love (1916-17) edited by John Worthen and Lindeth Vasey,Cambridge University Press, 1998, ISBN 0521373263. This edition is a volume in
The Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D H Lawrence and displays significant differences to the final published version
* The 'Prologue' to
Women in Love is a discarded section of an early version of the novel and is set four years after Gerald and Birkin have returned from a skiing holiday in the Tyrol. It is published as an appendix to the Cambridge edition, pp489-506
* Richard Beynon, (ed.),
D. H. Lawrence: The Rainbow and Women in Love (Cambridge: Icon Books, 1997).
* Michael Black (2001)
Lawrence's England: The Major Fiction, 1913 - 1920 (Palgrave-MacMillan)
* Paul Delaney (1979)
D. H. Lawrence's Nightmare: The Writer and his Circle in the Years of the Great War (Hassocks: Harvester Press)
*
F R Leavis (1955)
D H Lawrence: Novelist (London, Chatto and Windus)
*
F R Leavis (1976)
Thought, Words and Creativity: Art and Thought in D H Lawrence (London, Chatto and Windus)
*
Joyce Carol Oates (1978) "Lawrence's Götterdämmerung: The Apocalyptic Vision of Women in Love"* Charles L. Ross (1991)
Women in Love: A Novel of Mythic Realism (Boston, Mass.: Twayne)
* John Worthen,
The Restoration of Women in Love, in Peter Preston and Peter Hoare (eds.)(1989),
D H Lawrence in the Modern World (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan), pp7-26
*
Free ebook of Women in Love at
Project Gutenberg
