i want lines from this book tattooed onto me

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WOMEN IN LOVE

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D. H. LAWRENCE

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Possibly it’s not so surprising when a more-than-slightly fanatical working-class autodidact rewrites the Old Testament in order to put back all the sex that the original author left out. That it then astonishes, infuriates, bores and nauseates in jarring alternating spasms is completely expected. That Ken Russell made a movie of it was likewise predictable; but that his movie was a model of good taste was a great disappointment – come on, Ken, where were the tits and bums and the giant plastic phalluses and the naked nuns? DH Lawrence was a unique novelist. If he’d never existed we really wouldn’t have had to invent him. I’m thinking that now he’s subsided entirely into Eng Lit courses where he lurks like a half submerged lamprey, luring the innocent with his new-aginess and biting their soft parts with his fascism. You should probably read one DHL novel and this is probably the one. Certainly not The Rainbow! Are you kidding?


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This is a book by D. H. Lawrence that he considered his best work, in it examines relationships and societal expectations between men and women, and even men and men. There is not much plot and it is heavy on character development. The author spends way too much time talking about love on some meta level that leaves the reader exhausted as does the back and forth of these relationships between two women (sisters) and two males (best friends) in this industrial town of coal mining on the edge of Sherwood Forest. What I liked best about the book is that Birkin really is Lawrence. Gudrun is Katherine Mansfield (author of The Garden Party (1922) and Urusula is Lawrence's German wife (Frieda) and Gerald is Middleton Murry, Lawrence's closest friend. So that is how I experienced the book (the going on by Lawrence about love/not love was exhausting but I enjoyed the character study). There wasn't much of a plot but what there was involved some major events (the diving, the wandering about the mountain) and a whole lot of symbolism. Coal (industrial) soiling everything. And a lot of use of the words "inchoate, paradisial, sang froid". I was okay with the ending. I think the loss of friendship can be devastating. I have read other books by the author. I think this one, while it is Lawrence's favorite, is not mine but I did enjoy the window into Lawrence's life and the life of Katherine Mansfield in the pre 1920s. I am not sure whether this book contributes to literature today other than as a classic would contribute and it certainly is not controversial today as it was when written.


Rating 3.66

n  “Better a thousand times take one's chance with death, than accept a life one did not want.”n

It is the sequel to his novel The Rainbow and even tho I read The Rainbow first, it doesn't matter which one u read first. I mean Rainbow got banned and people got to read this one first so who fucking cares.
The novel's sexual subject matter caused controversy... fucking prudes, am I right ladies?
Quarantine made me so lazy and I got into a reading slump. I wanted to write a lengthy review but it took me 50years to finish it and I forgot what I wanted to say. Lucky you I guess. Long story short, I think that this is better than Rainbow but that may be just me. No one knows, known cares. I haven’t being outside for a while and my period will probably come tomorrow so I don’t think I can be trusted.

n  ‘’God, what is it to be a man! The freedom, the liberty, the mobility! You’re a man, you want to do a thing, you do it. You haven't the thousand obstacles a woman has in front of her.’’n
Go off sis

Infelizmente, este será o primeiro livro lido do projeto Linked Books sobre o qual apenas posso dar uma opinião desfavorável. Era mais que provável que isto viesse a acontecer, mas não estava nada à espera que fosse neste livro. Que grande desilusão.

É muito triste ter que falar assim de uma obra de um autor tão conhecido e importante na história da literatura, mas realmente não gostei nem um bocadinho deste livro. Muito sinceramente, foi um autêntico suplício chegar ao fim e se não fosse esta resolução que encetei neste projeto, de não rejeitar nenhuma referência literária, teria sem dúvida abandonado esta leitura. Para ajudar a esta tarefa que se tornou tão ingrata, é uma obra com quase quinhentas páginas

Ο D. H Lawrens εναντιώνετε σε όλα τα κοινωνικά στερεότυπα που τον πνίγουν… Στην φωνή του ήρωα του Μπίρκιν, ένιωθα ότι άκουγα τον ίδιο τον συγγραφέα, καθόλη την διάρκεια της ανάγνωσης. Θα μου πείτε βέβαια οτι οι μύχιες σκέψεις ενός ήρωα, είτε ακόμη και του ίδιου του αφηγητή, πρέπει να παραμένουν στο ίδιο το μυθιστόρημα και να μην θεωρούμε λαθεμένα ότι είναι οι ίδιες οι σκέψεις του δημιουργού, οτιδήποτε άλλο πέρα από αυτό, είναι παιδιάστικο. Όμως εάν διαβάσετε τις Ερωτευμένες γυναίκες θα καταλάβετε. Όλοι οι ήρωες υποφέρουν από την ίδια ασθένεια, την ανθρώπινη κοινωνία. Τους έχει αλυσοδέσει. Δεν μπορούν να εκφραστούν, δεν μπορούν να ερωτευτούν, δεν μπορούν να ξεφύγουν. Ο Lawrens πολύ πριν την σεξουαλική επανάσταση, επαναστάτησε για χάρη της. Όχι όμως γι�� την πράξη καθεαυτή, αλλά για κάτι πιο βαθύ. Μας θυμίζει ότι δεν υπάρχει παρθενικός έρωτας. Όταν είσαι ερωτευμένος ποθείς. Θες να φιλήσεις, θες να αγγίξεις και να ενωθείς. Πως γίνεται αυτό να είναι βρώμικο; Πως γίνεται το ίδιο το κορμί σου, που είναι κομμάτι δικό σου, να είναι βλάσφημο;
Μου άρεσε αρκετά, το διάβασα όμως σαν μέρος του ίδιου του συγγραφέα του. Ως μικρή έρευνα για αυτόν τον ιδιαίτερο άνθρωπο. Ενέταξα το έργο στην εποχή του και στην προσωπική ιστορία του δημιουργού του και είπα μου αρέσει. Αν τον διάβαζα χωρίς να γνωρίζω τίποτα απολύτως, απλά και μόνο για διασκέδαση, θα μου άρεσε; Χμ… ίσως όχι και τόσο. Δεν έχω καταλήξει ακόμα, διότι αντικειμενικά το Ερωτευμένες Γυναίκες μου χάρισαν πολλά, ειδικά τροφή για σκέψη.
«Αν υπάρχει, πράγματι, κάτι ανυπόφορο, αυτό είναι ο εξευτελισμός, η εκπόρνευση των μυστηρίων που ζούνε μέσα μας (…)
Από τον Πρόλογο του D. H Lawrens, Ερωτευμένες Γυναίκες, μετ. Γιάννης Λάμψας, Εξάντας, 1980.

A novel following 2 sisters in a provincial British town just before WW1, the idealistic and positive but naïve artist Gudrun Brangwen and the hard-nosed more level-headed cynical schoolteacher Ursula. Both women fall in love with men above their own social class, Gudrun with the coal baron Gerald Crich and Ursula with the school inspector Rupert Birkin whom most readers see as an alter ego for author D. H. Lawrence.

My first impression of ”Women in Love” was the WW1-era British equivalent to a Bret Easton Ellis novel – both this and Ellis' ”American Psycho” take great pleasure in depicting the cognitive dissonance resulting from stylish sexy rich successful people being absolutely terrible human beings. The chapter ”Water-Party” stands out in particular, where DHL in detail describes the beauty of the settings for the titular party (both nature and architecture) as well as the main characters' impeccable fashion sense... while showing most of them to be the most stupid and venal people imaginable – resulting in the easily preventable death by drowning of Gerald Crich's younger sister Diana. No wonder that Rupert Birkin, the one representative of the elite encountered here who has any connection to reality whatsoever, is a committed misanthrope. His views about gender issues also strike the typical 21st reader as at best very conservative at worst horrifically misogynistic – there is a chapter where Birkin talks about women having 2 natures just like a horse, of which the lower nature needs to be beaten into submission. As horrifying as I found this at first especially considering the likelihood it's the author's own opinion, things become more nuanced considering the full context of the directions the plot takes later on.

This brings us to the most interesting part of ”Women in Love”: DHL's willingness to constantly upend reader expectations. Despite Rupert Birkin's stated opinions on gender sounding extremely sexist, he ends up in practice treating his fiancee Ursula Brangwen as an equal – eventually shocking her out of her artificial public image, resulting in her developing a constructive relationship with the actual psychological impulses at work within her. Meanwhile, Rupert becomes less arrogant throughout the novel as a result of her getting fed up with his overgrown ego. Indeed, a recurring theme of ”Women in Love” is how Rupert and Ursula are both extremely cynical in philosophy as well as abrasive in personality yet end up for the most part being positive mutual influences – precisely as a consequence of drawing attention to their own worst aspects and having a cynical enough view of human nature to not view those negative sides as weird and scary. Compare and contrast to the other couple in the book, Gerald and Gudrun who get lost in idealised romantic self-images at odds with their real psychological constitutions – the result being Gerald draining her of positive energy and stabilising impulses, leaving her at the mercy of her own negative energies which she remains unable to develop a constructive relationship with throughout the story.

The increasingly dysfunctional relationship between Gerald Crich and Gudrun Brangwen goes in a disturbing direction during the chapter detailing Rupert and Ursula's honeymoon where Gerald and Gudrun follow as guests. (won't reveal too much for anyone who has still to read) This chapter contains absolutely gorgeous descriptions of Alpine landscapes (DHL absolutely masters the ”Crapsaccharine World” vibe) and the funniest scenes in the book: Descriptions of how Germans basically come across as Martians to the British main characters; as well as Gudrun getting bored with Gerald to instead fall in love with a German sculptor named Loerke, who frankly comes across as a the prototypical creeper who tries to look superficially progressive. (there are tons of people like that in art circles to this day) Funniest part has to be the mordantly hilarious anecdote, where the sculptor presents Gudrun with a pornographic sculpture - which Ursula instantly describes as tasteless kitsch, insulting everyone else in the room while coming across as the only sane person present. Gudrun Brangwen does NOT come across as the best judge of character throughout the book for sure. I myself wonder what she ever saw in Gerald Crich, who views himself as a bold Nietzschean superman creating a brave new world ruled by science and reason but to the reader looks like a boring and predictable conformist who never does or says anything not carefully calculated to increase his popularity and social status. Yet Gudrun does not realise this until near the end. Had she done so earlier like her sister, she could have saved herself a lot of trouble.

Other aspects in which ”Women in Love” turns out to be a far stranger novel than its reputation suggests include the abstract and surreal often outright psychedelic dream sequences describing the characters' inner metaphysical lives in colourful detail. Then we have the chapters where Rupert Birkin expounds on his favourite eccentric theories about psychology and religion at great length, such as his theory of the earliest human religions as corporeal and physically oriented similar to present day folk religions of sub-Saharan Africa where everyday physical desires and higher spiritual forces act as one and the same. Neither sidebar is one I expected in a novel ostensibly about as prosaic a topic as the love lives of middle-class Englishwomen.

At any case this is a novel I often found disturbing and frustrating, yet ended up surprising me and made me reconsider many of my basic assumptions about human nature and modern society. Definitely contains more content that will challenge almost any present reader, regardless of their political or religious standpoint, than the vast majority of so-called experimental or transgressive fiction published today.

El libro me quemaba en las manos, insoportable.

Below are my initial thoughts on this novel rather than a “rounded” review. And I appreciate that it might not make a lot of sense for anyone who has not read this book yet. I hope to come back to the subject. But for now I think it is a starting point. It is supposed to be a sequel to “The Rainbow”. But it is so very different in tone and style that I hardly felt any continuity. This novel is almost entirely based on dialogue and actions as opposed to lyrical interiority of the first book. It is more quarrelsome in the absence of the better word. Also it is soaked in violence and cruelty of characters to each other and more surprisingly- to animals. In general, although there is an attempt of seeing the future, bitterness seems to prevail.

I’ve hardly recognised Ursula as a character. She seemed to change and become, well, more boring. In the dialogues her speech is often accompanied by the verb “cried” instead of “said”. So she comes across as mildly unbalanced. But then again I guess she is supposed to be representing “common sense” in the novel compared to the others. Her sister, Gudrun, who hardly figured in “The Rainbow” is more appealing character here. That does not mean likeable, but at least a bit more complex and disillusioned. And their men, the ones they are supposed to be “in love” are both frankly, pathetic. All four are full of snobbery and often contempt for others, especially the “common folk”.

To balance that out though, there are a lot of marvellous scenes and observations to keep this novel moving. Some minor characters are well done, surprisingly, animals including. The aggressive fighting rabbit or independently minded cat Mino are unforgettable. Hermione, a liberal aristocrat and socialite is very effectively depicted. The scene of her attack of Birkin with lápiz azul paperweight is very powerful. I can see why Lady Ottoline Morrell, the potential prototype, wanted to sue the author. But secretly i have to admit by the end of the novel I sympathised with Hermione’s intentions quite a bit. Birkin was quite insufferable as far as the characters go. However, some episodes including him were the best in the book. For example, Birkin throwing stones into the reflection of the Moon or Birkin running around naked in the field after being hit on a head by Hermione with that paperweight. Another memorable scene is Gudrun dancing a la “Isidora Duncan” in front of the cows. Who can forget that!

The last few chapters gain a bit in psychological depth. Also a new minor character Loerke brought a bit of dynamism in the discussion of the role of art. And there is of course a dramatic end. But it hardly justifies the whole.

With such sheer amount of dialogue, I was hoping it would crystallise into the novel of ideas. But it has never quite reached that level. Birkin talks constantly. But his thoughts are a bit shallow or jumbled more like bad sermons. Initially at least Ursula tried to challenge him, but then she stopped and started to “cry” as a response. “Cry” not in a sense of a distress sobbing, but in a sense of a raised voice. I tried to imagine how does that sound, and it seems it makes her sound a bit hysterical. For example:

Birkin:”When I see that clear, beautiful chair, and I think of England, even Jane Austen’s England—it had living thoughts to unfold even then, and pure happiness in unfolding them. And now, we can only fish among the rubbish heaps for the remnants of their old expression. There is no production in us now, only sordid and foul mechanicalness.’ ‘It isn’t true,’ cried Ursula. ‘Why must you always praise the past, at the expense of the present? really, I don’t think so much of Jane Austen’s England. It was materialistic enough, if you like—’ ‘It could afford to be materialistic,’ said Birkin, ‘because it had the power to be something other—which we haven’t. We are materialistic because we haven’t the power to be anything else—try as we may, we can’t bring off anything but materialism: mechanism, the very soul of materialism.’ Ursula was subdued into angry silence. She did not heed what he said. She was rebelling against something else. ‘And I hate your past. I’m sick of it,’ she cried.”

This is quite indicative of their exchanges and general pathos/depth of the novel’s discussions. She “cries”; he longes for the past green fields. And all of them “hate” one thing or another.

In a strange way, this novel has reminded me “A Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann written broadly at the same time and preoccupied with a range of ideas Lawrence attempts to touch upon. Both novels are driven by a dialogue and the characters. But when Lawrence goes for the language and visual effects, Mann manages to deal with ideas and zeitgeist of pre-war Europe in more profound way.

I totally agree with Francis Wilson who said in her book about Lawrence: “Only if we agree with Birkin on all counts does the novel become the prophetic event that Lawrence wanted it to be, and the only people who agree with Birkin are teenagers.”

But I will definitely remember Gudrun’s taste for colourful stockings.

A Different Kind of War

D. H. Lawrence wrote Women in Love in 1916, when he was living in Cornwall, reviled for his pacifism and impoverished by prosecution of his previous book, The Rainbow, for pornography. Undaunted, Lawrence wrote a novel that virtually defies the war and continues to explore physical enjoyment as part of the relationship between men and women. But the physical is only a part of a prolonged psychological entanglement between the sexes that sometimes seems more a kind of warfare than traditional romantic courtship. The result is a challenging book, simultaneously of its time and out of it.

It is challenging in part because nobody's views are simple. Two sisters, Gudrun and Ursula Brangwen, become attracted to two men, coal-mining heir Gerald Crich, and his friend Rupert Birkin, making a curiously classless quartet. Birkin, a school inspector, is based on Lawrence himself, and he strives towards various ideals that confuse even him and may be quite unrealizable in practice. Indeed, the book might as well be called "Men in Love," since Lawrence spends at least as much time with his two men, and there is the added complication of homoerotic overtones that climax in the nude wrestling scene so memorably captured in the 1969 Ken Russell movie. But while the women initially dance around their emotions almost as much as the men, in the end it is their comparative clarity that bring the two affairs to their respective conclusions.

In her fine novel Zennor In Darkness, Helen Dunmore portrayed Lawrence in Cornwall shadowed by the First World War. It was a surprise, therefore to find that the war is never mentioned in Lawrence's own book. Although mostly set in the English Midlands, its cultural context is European. Its last hundred pages take place in Austria, and its characters seem to drop into untranslated French, Italian, and especially German with some ease. Lawrence himself had spent some time in Germany before the war and his wife Frieda was German; writing in 1916, his insistence on the commonality of the two cultures was a pacifist response to the belligerent nationalism around him. Yet there is a psychological sense of impending catastrophe, as though simplicity had fled from human relationships, and the quick pulse of this English summer will never return with quite that passion, quite that ease.

Lawrence is continental also in his artistic taste. He almost never mentions a female character without describing the colors of her clothes: hat, skirt, sash, and always colored stockings. The hues are brilliant, going together in subtle harmonies set off by bold accents. One thinks of Matisse and other then-contemporary European painters—not surprisingly since Gudrun herself is an artist. There are important encounters with art at several points in the book: Birkin's London flat-mate, like Picasso before him, collects African carvings, and a German expressionist sculptor called Loerke will become important in the final chapters. Indeed the aesthetic of expressionism is central to the book; the characters do not just feel things, they feel them in brilliant color, and any one emotion may immediately be replaced by its exact opposite. So a character may feel love at one moment and intense hatred the next. Despite opening with a grimy image of cabbage stalks coated in coal dust and ending in the pristine brilliance of unbroken snow, the emotional world of this novel is a garish roller-coaster ride in a night-time fairground hung with colored lights.

And that is ultimately the problem. Lawrence is so intense in his descriptions, so devoid of half-tones, so prone to using sexual imagery to describe encounters that may have little or no physical component at all, that one soon loses one's bearings and becomes exhausted. About a third of the way through, Ursula kisses Birkin "to show him she was no shallow prude." There is a "rushing of passion" and "soon he was a perfect hard flame of passionate desire for her." In the next paragraph, "satisfied and shattered, fulfilled and destroyed," Birkin goes home. What on earth has happened? Not what one might think. There are plenty more such moments to come, for all four characters, and several returns to revulsion or even indifference, so that when Lawrence's metaphors actually do mean what they appear to indicate, it seems little more than we have heard before. Even with a writer famous for breaking the barriers of prudery, it can be hard almost a century later to extract the meaning of what he was actually saying.

Beyond the battlefront, war has a way of making us question moral and spiritual values. I found myself thinking of a very different writer, Ernest Hemingway, who in n  A Farewell to Armsn plunged into the fighting that Lawrence utterly rejected. But he had the same fascination with obsessive self-examination that may ultimately say more about the period than who battled whom.

"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 was 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. She felt that memory was a dirty trick played upon her. What was this decree, that she should 'remember'! Why not a bath of pure oblivion, a new birth, without any recollections or blemish of a past life."

Another banger <3

As in my earlier Lawrence review, I read this while living in isolation in the Czech Republic and found it as good as the film, if not better. The homoeroticism of male-bonding really comes out but the eroticism is not confined to men. This book contains the famous line, “The proper way to eat a fig, in society, is to split it in four, holding it by the stump, and open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist, honied, heavy-petalled four-petalled flower.” The allusion to women is difficult to overlook, and I could never look at a fig the same way again! This aside, the interwoven relationships were also very well drawn and I never grew bored of the narrative here. A forceful book which I would like to revisit someday, now with a few more years on my back and perhaps a greater understanding of some things in life that I overlooked before.