Women in Love [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Womeyi in Love is the sequel to The Rainbow-, indeed, the two books are so closely interwoven that Lawrence considered calling them Wmien in Love: Part One and Part Two. The Rainbow concerns the emotional lives and loves of the Brangwen family, and Women in Love continues the theme, but concentrates on the two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun. They love respectively Rupert Birkin (a self-portrait of Lawrence) and his friend Gerald Crich, the son of a local colliery owner. It is in the detailed interaction of the four main characters that the quality of the novel becomes apparent. Birkin believes that emotional salvation is to be found in making a passionate marriage in which each partner recognises the other's separateness; to this he wishes to add a different but similarly deep friendship with a man. This friendship he offers to Gerald, who is imable to accept it. Gerald's character is a mixture of violence and weakness, and this arouses the worst instincts in Gudrun. During a trip to the Alps, following Ursula and Birldn's marriage, the emptiness and despair of Gudrun and Gerald's relationship becomes ultimately destructive, while Birkin and Ursula move to a tender and fulfilling partnership. Women in Love was written in 1916 immediately after The Rainbow (1915), but because The Rainbow was so imfavourably received (the edition was withdrawn after copies were destroyed by the police), Women in Love was not pubHshed imtil 1920 in the United States and 1921 in Britain. The climate of the times was such that Lawrence's serious treatment of sexual themes outraged the self-appointed guardians of public morals. One reviewer wrote, 'I do not claim to be a literary critic, but I know dirt when I smell it, and here is dirt in heaps - festering, putrid heaps which smell to high Heaven.' Others called for the book to be banned as a loathsome study of sexual depravity, misleading youth to unspeakable disaster. It is ironic that, as R. C. Churchill points out in The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature,' if Lawrence had Hved to a normal old age, he would have found himself as revered a literary figure as Swinburne or Hardy, some of whose work provoked nearly as much indignation