Women in Love: Introduction by David Ellis [Hardcover]

Women in Love,the novel that D. H. Lawrence considered his best, is a powerful portrayal of two couples dynamically engaged in a struggle with themselves, with each other, and with life’s intractable limitations.         

The sisters Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, whom we first met in Lawrence’s novelThe Rainbow,here become involved with two close friends: Rupert, an intellectual school inspector; and Gerald, the wealthy heir to a mine owner. The turbulent relationships that result—chronicled with an emotional and sexual frankness that provoked controversy on the book’s publication in 1920—take the characters from an English landscape of coal mines and sooty factories to the snowy heights of the Alps, where tragedy strikes.

Women in Lovewas written during World War I, and while that conflict is never mentioned in the novel, a sense of background danger, of lurking catastrophe, continually informs its drama. Lawrence was a powerful, prophetic writer, but in addition he brought such delicacy to his treatment of the human and natural worlds that E. M. Forster’s claim that he was the greatest imaginative novelist of his generation does him too little justice rather than too much.

David Ellis is the author of Lawrence's Non-Fiction: Art, Thought and Genre and Wordsworth, Freud and the Spots of Time. He has been commissioned to write Volume HI of the New Cambridge biography of Lawrence.Sisters

Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their father's house in Beldover, working and talking. Ursula was stitching a piece of brightly-coloured embroidery, and Gudrun was drawing upon a board which she held on her knee. They were mostly silent, talking as their thoughts strayed through their minds.

"Ursula," said Gudrun, "don't you really want to get married?"

Ursula laid her embroidery in her lap ló'