Women in Love

Literary fiction

First published: 1957
Print length: 592 pagesPenguin Classics, 2007

Description

In industrial England before the First World War, sisters Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen pursue different visions of independence and intimacy. Ursula, a schoolteacher, becomes involved with alienated intellectual Rupert Birkin, while Gudrun, a painter, enters an increasingly destructive relationship with coal heir Gerald Crich. Friendship and attraction bind all four, complicated by the powerful psychological and physical connection between Rupert and Gerald. Their conversations and confrontations move from the Nottinghamshire-Derbyshire border through British society and eventually toward the Tyrolean Alps. Lawrence uses the contrasting couples to examine desire, power, gender, industrial modernity, and the struggle to preserve an individual self within love, making emotional intimacy inseparable from wider arguments about how society should be lived.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Dense · Descriptive · Lyrical · Ornate

Pace

Measured

Tone

Atmospheric · Dark · Philosophical · Reflective

Structure

Linear

Focus

Character · Ideas · Relationships

Emotional intensity

5 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 5 / 5
Ideas: 5 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

ClassGenderIdentityLovePowerSexuality

About D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, critic, and travel writer whose modernist work repeatedly tests intimate life against industrial society and social convention. His fiction is driven less by incident than by shifting pressures within families and couples. Dense, descriptive, often lyrical prose follows bodily responses, arguments, and changes of mood, while essayistic passages bring conflicts over class, gender, instinct, and selfhood into the open. Sons and Lovers concentrates these methods within a mining family, tracing how Paul Morel’s bond with his mother constrains his adult attachments. The Rainbow broadens the scale into a three-generation family chronicle shaped by industrial growth. Women in Love brings two couples into sustained conversation and confrontation, exposing the links among desire, power, and independence. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the division between mind and body is joined to the division between classes. Lawrence’s frank treatment of sexuality made several major novels objects of censorship, but it belonged to his larger concern with lives deformed by property, hierarchy, and mechanization.

Lady Chatterley's Lover Apple Books

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Penguin Classics
Language: English
ISBN: 9780141441542

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