At one point a female character dances in front of a herd of cattle to demonstrate her sensuousness. At another point one character demands that another stop his "metricious persiflage" in the heat of an argument. In most paragraphs a wish for the annihilation of humankind is expressed with boiling rage. A Houellebecq novel for 1920s fascists but to be fair even Houellebecq has written better stuff than this misogynist pretentious bollocks. D.H. Lawrence should have stayed down in the mines.

You know that cliché Hollywood storyline where a person leaves home to go to college, then returns wearing black, listening to whiny, sad music on endless repeat, & moaning how the world sucks & then you die & our society has no meaning because there’s nothing PURE or NATURAL or TRUTHFUL but nobody else has the guts to point out the lack because The Man beats them down into a predictable, boring life that isn’t really living, & omg how were they previously content in this small, meaningless, contained existence & how is anyone ever truly HAPPY because nobody wants to discuss these things when they have WORK & KIDS & BILLS, the foundations of a mundane & purposeless lifestyle, yet the artists & writers & philosophers are such posers & not truly LIVING either, because they try so hard to be different & their trying just shows how they’re not different at all, so why can’t we all just live how we want, cuz that’s the only route to knowing thyself & being truly alive?!

...That’s what this book is. Also, the 2 male MCs are gay for each other, which they try to repress with varying degrees of success.

Actually, the parts about Birkin & Gerald’s unspoken sexual proclivities would’ve made for an interesting story—but this is only a minor part, all things considered. The bulk of the book is a tedious Nihilistic diatribe from a pack of spoiled 20-something whiners, & I lost count of how many times I wanted to punch Birkin in the face. I’m aware of the historical context—the bleakness of the Great War + Lawrence’s own existential discontents combined with poor health—but seriously. This could’ve been a third of the length & had the same impact. Strung-together vignettes mixed with talking heads rarely makes for a good read, & I have little patience for this breed of self-indulgent angst. Perhaps I’d have been more sympathetic in that obnoxious post-high-school/pre-college-grad phase everyone goes through, but nowadays this sort of cyclical philosophical douchebaggery is a non-starter for yours truly. (I guess The Man beat me down.

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

I guess I'm a bit of a snob about classics--I like them to be 19th century, preferably European/English. Trollope, Dickens, Austen, Eliot, James, Wharton (I know, American). It's not that I don't read 20th century classics, but I'm hoping to put Lawrence on the list of authors I needn't read any more. (Dostoyevsky is already there.) I had read Lady Chatterley in college, of course, and then managed to avoid Lawrence all these years. Until now. His best novel, but not mine. Way too much philosophizing and characters I didn't like. I haven't the brain or patience for this, I fear.

Bizarre...

What a most wondrous book! I've been a fan of D.H Lawrence for a good decade, having discovered his work when I was an NYU college student, but this is the first time I have read his work in many years. From the moment that I saw Gudrun and Ursula chatting about the uselessness of marriage, espousing the fun of life and companionship over the drains of establishing oneself, I knew I was in the throes of a book I could deeply relate to. Women in Love is not merely a reflection on the friendship of two sisters. It's a novel about failing to be who you are, learning to accept sexual difference, embracing one's destiny despite the odds. It's a surprisingly modern book considering it was written in the 1930s. It really reads like a page-turner, which is a feat for a book almost a century old.

I really have nothing but good things to say about this book. I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to read literatures at the fringes of sexuality and freedom in the early 20th century.

Egotistical and full of himself. Insufferably narcissistic. Full of talk to hear himself talk, which they now call a “modern” style.

I preferred Lady Chatterly's Lover but perhaps I like the subject matter better. I think DH wants to feed sex into everything and doesn’t care about love. He thinks love’s an overworn subject, so much so that he wanted to write this book about it and give it the last word and then bury it. But it’s a subject too big for him, a fact that probably kept him up at night. Sex is more easily mastered and he did well with Lady Chatterly's Lover.

I suffered through Women and kept a list of some of his more overblown clauses (my favorites: “dangerous flamey sensitiveness” and “full mystic knowledge of his suave loins of darkness”). He’s one of a kind, that DH.

He had his moments but most of the book had me rolling my eyes and throwing it down on the table saying “Are you KIDDING me??”

Ένα από τα βιβλία που έχω βαρεθεί πάρα πολύ να διαβάζω! Οι χαρακτήρες μου ήταν αδιάφοροι, οι σκέψεις και τα συναισθήματα τους με κούρασαν και δεν είχα καμία αγωνία για την τύχη τους!

*

I can review this only in relation to its precursor, The Rainbow (review here).

My Journey

I went straight from the flames of floral, rural passion in The Rainbow, to this often brittle discussion of the abstract, set in a more mechanical age, where animals - metaphorical and literal - are key, and death’s shadow hovers hungrily. It's beautiful, entrancing, but also opaque and frustrating.

I travelled with Ursula from her teenage years in the balmy countryside, where people act on their desires, to her earnest twenties: first in a grimy northern mining town, then in the frigid, glistening ice of the Tyrollean Alps. It’s not such a linear narrative as The Rainbow; more a series of episodes (chapter lengths vary hugely - between 3 and 50 pages).

It seems to ask:
•tMust the rainbow hues leach out of life (Gudrun’s ever-colourful stocking notwithstanding)?
•tMust passion end in death (not necessarily the little one)?

This is a novel of ideas, but I often felt unequal to them. There was so much to wrestle with, I was stripped bare by the dizzying mix of themes, language, passions, lives - and deaths. I had to submit to the experience, though in a rather different way to The Rainbow.

My status on finishing was a single word, “Eviscerated”. Ruminating further, a conversation towards the end is pertinent. One character tells their partner “It’s over”, and the reply is “But it isn’t finished… There must be finality”. In writing this, I think I have found finality. (I will return to Lawrence, though!)

Lawrence wrote this after Wilde, during a war (WW1), and before Waugh. It has the self-consciously clever dialogue of the first and last, in the context of warring relationships: all conflicted between love and hate, artifice and instinct, life and death - murderous desire, even.

The intellectual sparring matches have a theatrical quality, as if the protagonists are speaking for posterity. Then the audience departs, the mask falls, and naturalistic passion, action and imagery blossoms, such as the blissful release for Birkin, rolling naked in the primroses. “He wanted to touch them all… to saturate himself with the touch of them all… It was such a fine, cool, subtle touch all over him, he seemed to saturate himself with their contact.” The rarer physical assaults (lapis, wrestling, and in the snow) have greater visceral power as a result.

It seems to say that whatever persona we try to present, however much we try to assert our will (a recurring theme), we’re all animals underneath.

Animals

What a carnal carnival of animals this is. People are likened to, amongst other things: smiling wolf, hermit crab, pouncing hound, octopus, restless bird, “slithering sea-lion”, “funeral bird, feeding on the miseries of the people”, small cat, dog, cockerel, bird of paradise, rabbit, wild animal, shrew, stallion, “hopping flea”, fish, weasel, voice like a gull, water-spiders, horses, python, “eyes as keen as a hawk”, water-rat, “elegant beetle”, seal, “eyes blazed like a tiger’s”, bat, amphibious beast, eagle, “humble maggot”, wearing “startling colours, like a macaw”, eels, various insects, and “strange moths”!

Gudrun’s art typically features animals and birds, her friendship with Loerke is kindled by a picture of his statue of a naked girl on a horse, and there are actual animals at key points in the story:
•tUrsula and Gudrun watch Gerald violently beat his horse to submission, when it is terrified by a train.
•tGudrun confronts an alarming herd of cattle, but finds inner strength (and euythmics).
•tA chapter is devoted to Birkin’s cat - given to him by Hermione, and still part of the power she wields over him.
•tAnother chapter is about a vicious pet rabbit (called Bismarck) that draws blood from Gerald and Gudrun.


Plot

There are four main characters: Ursula Brangwen and her sister Gudrun, only a year younger. They are very close, but it’s also fiery relationship. Both teach at the grammar school: Ursula as a general teacher and Gudrun just art (she is really a sculptor, has travelled abroad, and lived in Bohemian London).

They become involved with Rupert Birkin, a school inspector, and Gerald Crich, eldest son of a wealthy colliery owner. Birkin and Gerald have a deep and conflicted relationship with each other. Women in Love - or Men in Love? The Crich family is large, the mother mentally unstable, and the father physically declining. We know nothing of Birkin’s family.

The four go to Innsbruck, where Loerke, a German artist, is added to the increasingly toxic mix of relationships.

Ursula and Gudrun are fiercely independent women, in thought and deed, including their relationships. They are not afraid of what other people think. The problem is that that often can’t decide what they think and so cannot decide what they should do and not do: “His licentiousness was repulsively attractive” and “she was far, far from being at ease with him”. And yet…

The men’s attitudes to women are not as positive or equal. At times, they’re exploitative, at other times, women are considered second best, albeit decorative and convenient.

Towards the end, I feared Lawrence was going to quash all that and have them either settle for conventionality, or suffer for not doing so...

Recurring Themes

Is it better to look at things as a whole, or take them to pieces? “I really don’t want to be forced into all this criticism and analysis of life. I really do want to see things in their entirety, with their beauty left in them.” In this review, I've opted for the former.

It is set in age of change: mechanisation, social mobility, equality, and philanthropy. To the father, “in Christ, he was one with his workmen”, but to his son, they “were his instruments” and “What mattered was the great social productive machine.”

Primarily though, this is about relationships:

The types of love, relationships, and marriage considered and entered into is very broad-minded for the time, such as “a mutual union in separateness”. It also explores how/if sex and friendship relate. “She had had lovers, she had known passion. But this was neither love nor passion. It was the daughters of men coming back to the sons of God, the strange inhuman sons of God.”

Homosexuality, bisexuality, and non-monogamous relationships suffuse the story. It’s not just the famous naked wrestling: is far less ambiguous than I expected. “I believe in the additional perfect relationship between a man and a man.” Later, "You are enough for me, as far as a woman is concerned. You are all women to me. But I wanted a man friend, as eternal as you and I are eternal... to make it complete, really happy, I wanted eternal union with a man too: another kind of love."

Conflict and duality are present in all the main relationships (love, hate, and whose will will triumph), violence and coercion too. “Always it was this eternal see-saw, one destroyed that the other might exist, one ratified because the other was nulled.” Ultimately, “One of them must triumph over the other”.

There is no escape, “It was a fight to the death between them - or to new life: though in what the conflict lay, no one could say” and "She felt an approaching release, a new fountain of life rising up in her... Yet underneath was death itself."

Quotes

•t“A strange enmity… very near to love.”

•t“I hate subtleties. I always think they are a sign of weakness.”

•t“The lake lay all grey and visionary, stretching into the moist, translucent vista of trees and meadow.”

•t“It was rather delicious to feel her drawing his self-revelation from him… And her dark eyes seemed to be looking through into his naked organism… She wanted the secret of him, the experience of his male being.”

•t“She seemed to become soft, subtly to infuse herself into his bones, as if she were passing into him in a black, electric flow. Her being suffused into his veins like a magnetic darkness.”

•t“They always kept a gap, a distance between them, they wanted always to be free of each other. Yet there was a curious heart-straining towards each other.”

•t“She seemed to grip the hours by the throat, to force her life from them.”

•t“It was a sunny, soft morning in early summer, when life ran in the world subtly like a reminiscence.”

•t“The heavy gold glamour of approaching sunset lay over all the colliery district, and the ugliness overlaid with beauty was like a narcotic to the senses… over all the amorphous squalor a kind of magic was cast.”

•t“The broad dialect was curiously caressing to the blood… In their voices she could hear the voluptuous resonance of darkness, the strong, dangerous underworld, mindless, inhuman. They sounded also like strange machines heavily oiled.”

•t“Why should you always be doing?” Often, I wanted the characters to do more doing (and less talking).

•t“He saw her face strangely enkindled, as if suffused from within by a powerful sweet fire. His soul was arrested in wonder. She was enkindled in her own living fire. Arrested in wonder and in pure, perfect attraction, he moved towards her.”

•t“On the water, lanterns were coming alight, faint ghosts of warm flame floating in the pallor of the first twilight. The earth was spread with darkness, like lacquer, overhead was a pale sky, all primrose, and the lake was pale as milk in one part. Away at the landing stage, tiniest points of coloured rays were stringing themselves in the dusk... All round, shadow was gathering from the trees.”

•tPain “gradually absorbed hi life. Gradually it drew away all his potentiality, it bled him into the dark, it weaned him of life.”

•t“The men were satisfied to belong to the great and wonderful machine, even whilst it destroyed them...Their hearts died within them, but their souls were satisfied.”

•t“I want you to drop your assertive will… I want you to trust yourself so implicitly, that you can let yourself go.”

•t“He kissed her softly… like dew falling.”

•t“Her father was not a coherent human being, he was a roomful of old echoes.”

•tWrestling, “They became accustomed to each other, to each other's rhythm, they got a kind of mutual physical understanding...as if they would break into a oneness… working into a tighter closer oneness of struggle, with a strange, octopus-like knotting and flashing of limbs in the subdued light of the room… the strange sound of flesh escaping under flesh. Often, in the white interlaced knot of violent living being that swayed silently, there was no head to be seen, only the swift, tight limbs, the solid white backs, the physical junction of two bodies clinched into oneness… The earth seemed to tilt and sway, and a complete darkness was coming over his mind. He did not know what happened.”

•t“The talk went on like a rattle of small artillery... the continual splatter of verbal jest, designed to give a tone of flippancy to a stream of conversation that was all critical and general, a canal of conversation rather than a stream. The attitude was mental and very wearying.”

•tH's face: “There was something of the stupidity and the unenlightened self-esteem of a horse in it.”

•t“Her pity for him was as cold as stone, its deepest motive was hate of him, and fear of his power over her, which she must always counterfoil.”

•t“She was like a flower just opened in the rain, the heart of the blossom just newly visible, seeming to emit a warmth of retained sunshine.”

•t“And now, behold, from the smitten rock of the man's body, from the strange marvellous flanks and thighs, deeper, further in mystery than the phallic source, came the floods of ineffable darkness and ineffable riches.”

•t“She had her desire of him, she touched, she received the maximum of unspeakable communication in touch, dark, subtle, positively silent, a magnificent gift and give again, a perfect acceptance and yielding, a mystery... the immemorial magnificence of mystic, palpable, real otherness.”

•t“He seemed to be gathering her into himself, her warmth, her softness, her adorable weight, drinking in the suffusion of her physical being, avidly. He lifted her, and seemed to pour her into himself, like wine into a cup… So she relaxed, and seemed to melt, to flow into him, as if she were some infinitely warm and precious suffusion filling into his veins, like an intoxicant.

•t“She reached up, like Eve reaching to the apples on the tree of knowledge… touching his face with her infinitely delicate, encroaching wondering fingers… Her soul thrilled with complete knowledge. This was the glistening, forbidden apple, this face of a man.”

•t“To know him, to gather him in by touch... She wanted to touch him and touch him and touch him.”

•t“It was a rather stiff, sad meeting, more like a verification of separateness than a reunion.”

•t“There they sat down, folded together, folded round with the same rug, creeping in nearer and ever nearer to one another, till it seemed they had crept right into each other, and become one substance.”

•t“His heart went up like a flame of ice.”

•tThey “found themselves in a vague, unsubstantial outdoors of dim snow and ghosts of an upper-world, that made strange shadows before the stars... It seemed conscious, malevolent, purposive in its intense murderous coldness.”

•t“The first days passed in an ecstasy of physical motion, sleighing, skiing, skating, moving in an intensity of speed and white light that surpassed life itself, and carried the souls of the human beings beyond into an inhuman abstraction of velocity and weight and eternal, frozen snow.”

•t“It was a fight to the death, she knew it now.”

•t“Either the heart would break, or cease to care.”

Moony

One of my favourite passages, from the chapter titled "Moony":
Throwing stones at the moon’s reflection: “Darts of bright light shot asunder, darkness swept over the centre. There was no moon, only a battlefield of broken lights and shadows, running close together. Shadows, dark and heavy, struck again and again across the place where the heart of the moon had been, obliterating it altogether. The white fragments pulsed up and down, and could not find where to go, apart and brilliant on the water like the petals of a rose that a wind has blown far and wide… He saw the moon regathering itself insidiously, saw the heart of the rose intertwining vigorously and blindly, calling back the scattered fragments, winning home the fragments, in a pulse and in effort of return.” Throw another stone: “Flakes of light appeared here and there, glittering tormented among the shadows, far off, in strange places; among the dripping shadow of the willow on the island.”

Amusing Bafflement

•tChapter VI has three references to “inchoate eyes”, whatever that means.

•t“He rocked on the water perfectly, like the rocking of phosphorescence.” Yes, he’s in a boat, but even so…

•t“Her soul was destroyed with the exquisite shock of his invisible fluid lightning… Ah much, much, many days harvesting for her large, yet perfectly subtle and intelligent hands upon the field of his living, radio-active body.” Ugh - or LOL?

*Picture sources
Carpet of primroses: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/...
Brinsley colliery: http://www.healeyhero.co.uk/rescue/ea...
Alpine peak: http://il1.picdn.net/shutterstock/vid...

First of all, this book should be called something more like "I Hate You With the White Hot Intensity of a Thousand Suns" instead of it's actual title. If people are really walking around with the thoughts that Lawrence writes of in this novel, I AM PERSONALLY TERRIFIED! With that being said, the novel was a great read lol. My husband commented at one point, "I've never seen you so caught up in a book." I really couldn't put it down. I will also add that though the title would seem to indicate that it focuses on women, it really doesn't. There are four main characters in my view and two of them are men. I can't really say that the women have more than a bit over 50% of the books time dedicated to them. Maybe at the beginning it's that way but it's pretty much equal time for the two sexes through the bulk of the book. And it is not a small book. I enjoyed it. But I enjoy period novels so I am naturally drawn into them. Enjoy!

UPDATE: 4.5-Almost perfect. Maybe because, to me, "The Rainbow" (a prequel) is this author's masterpiece. Every few years there is an article some place that list the best/hottest sex scenes of all time in film. This has the one and the reason it's so hot is that there is no sex...or maybe there is...the intensity of the foreplay, of a hand locking a door, builds to a 'will they or won't they' scene that has no equal. It's iconic in the way Hitchcock's 'Psycho' shower scene is: there isn't anything like it, it's edited and scored stupendously, and you think you see things you don't thus proving the old maxim that "the primary sex organs are in our heads." Also, this is a case of a film being better than the book. (Did I mention there is indeed quite a bit of real nudity in the film?) So, relative to "Rainbow" and the film, a tad short of five stars.

ORIGINAL REVIEW
I read this years ago, and right after I had seen the film with Alan Bates, Oliver Reed, and Glenda Jackson. That was an interesting experience, as I thought the film was actually better (and far steamier!) than the book. (I may have thought differently if I'd read the book first.) But I thought the screenwriters/film told the story just fine in only 2 hours. I liked the book, but it just felt like a slow read after seeing the movie. I know perhaps I'm not being fair, but that's just the way it is. And I just started the "prequel", "The Rainbow."

resurrecting this goodreads account just to say that this is PERHAPS the epitome of pretentious literary 'classics', am meant to read this for a seminar, and am quitting halfway through a chapter. 270 pages in and if i listen to another one of these v v unlikeable characters chat shit for 5 pages about how they hate humanity or something I may quit my degree. For context, one of the main characters is based on the author himself and mirrors his views, which are retrospectively pretentious and maudlin and are the makings of a very successful tumblr account among emo tweens. Ironically, this boy chats pure shite about how boring the world is whilst being trapped in maybe the most boring novel I've read all year, and there's also a weird bit in this where this girl starts dancing around some cows in some sort of spiritual way. It's probably significant - something about cows. Are we all just cows? Or are we all just women dancing around aimlessly in a cow field? Or maybe we must make the connection between the cow and the woman, the human and the animal???????????? VERY insightful, thought-provoking stuff.

This novel is nearly 500 pages long in like a size 10 font :( also will probs delete this review soon but just thought I seemed cute in it :3