The foursome, sick of England, travel to a snowy valley in the Tyrolean Alps.
Eventually Birkin leaves Hermione for Ursula, and Gerald and Gudrun get together. As the novel begins, Rupert is extricating himself from a relationship with Hermione Roddice, an avowedly modern and progressive Baronet’s daughter. Early in the book, they meet two men who are close friends: Rupert Birkin, an inspector of schools, and Gerald Crich, an “industrial magnate,” heir to a large mining company. The novel thrives on these arguments: disagreement is a moral force in Women in Love, its highest value.Īt the center of those disagreements are two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, a teacher and an artist, respectively. The characters might not actually be at war with each other, but they are always at loggerheads. Although the novel is set in the English Midlands in an unspecified year before WWI and so doesn’t concern the war itself, Lawrence wished “the time to remain unfixed, so that the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters.” That’s a strange thing to say: it only makes sense if war - or at least its emotional effects, like bitterness - is a natural state of affairs. That aliveness might be a reaction against the terrible war during which it was written. You’ll race through it, I promise, caught up in its passion, its intensity, its extraordinary prose.
There’s nothing dutiful or high-minded about it.
But you don’t have to be a student to enjoy Women in Love. After all, it’s about young, intelligent, talented people figuring out how they want to live in the world, and what they will have to change to make that happen. The letter to Carswell continues, “But it is, it must be, the beginning of a new world too.” Perhaps that’s why my students love the novel so much. Its grim fascination with endings is balanced by a joyful appreciation of beginnings. To one of his most supportive friends, the Scottish writer Catherine Carswell, Lawrence admitted, “The book frightens me: it is so end-of-the-world.” Indeed, its working title was Dies Irae (Day of Wrath). It’s also intense and uncompromising, to the point that it daunted even its author. Lawrence’s masterpiece, Women in Love (1920), is one of the great novels of the twentieth century. And thanks to the old gang at Open Letters : Sam Sacks, John Cotter, Steve Donoghue, Greg Waldmann, and, especially, Rohan Maitzen.
Thanks to Karen & Simon for their indefatigable hosting of these events. Women in Love is my favourite book, and I never miss a chance to talk it up. You can still find it in the OLM archives, but when I heard that Karen and Simon had chosen 1920 for their latest Reading Club project, I thought I’d dust it off. I wrote this essay in 2016–O brave old world!–for Open Letters Monthly (of blessed memory–how I miss it).
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