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I’ve heard DH Lawrence called a misogynist, and I can’t think of anything more absurd. I can’t name another man author who writes women more like people than DH Lawrence� of the Edwardian or modern era. His female characters, on the whole, are intellectually brilliant and intensely independent (there’s even a woman physics professor). You won’t find many frilly-headed little husband-hunters here (hi, Jane Austen).

Lawrence has a gift for pulling out scenes that give you this under current of feeling, indescribable impressions that are straight out of real life. Conversations or arguments between people, where it’s difficult to articulate what they’re really talking about, subtextually, but you absolutely feel what they’re saying.

Also, sex. Everything, every emotion, has an undercurrent of sexual energy, even the most innocuous of things. Even the description of the architecture of a building is absurdly erotic:

Here the stone leapt up from the plain of earth, leapt up in a manifold, clustered desire each time, up, away from the horizontal earth, through twilight and dusk and the whole range of desire, through the swerving, the declination, ah, to the ecstasy, the touch, the meeting and the consummation� this timeless consummation, where the trust from earth met the thrust from earth and the arch was locked on to the keystone of ecstasy.

� I need a cold shower after looking at that building (a church, no less!).


------------PLOT SUMMARY------------

(view spoiler)[So, we start off with Tom Brangwen and his new wife, Lydia Lensky, and Lydia’s young daughter from her previous marriage, Anna. The couple later has two sons, but no one is closer than Tom and Anna; though they aren’t related by blood, father and daughter understand one another better than anyone else could.

Anna marries her step-cousin, Will Brangwen (the son of Tom’s brother), which is a little sketch because, if we consider Tom to have adopted Anna� and that seems a fair assumption, because she calls him Daddy� Will and Anna’s kids are also the parents� first cousins once-removed (and the kids themselves are their own second cousins) which sounds exactly like my extended family (it’s an Ohio thing!).

Anyway, Anna and Will fundamentally do not understand each other, can’t even begin to understand each other. The surprise of the other, which drew them into one another, makes a black, rotting spot in their relationship, the separateness itself becoming so resentful to them both that it separates them even more, to the point that they each (separately, of course) contemplate killing themselves to get away from the glaring presence of the space between them.

They are also mortally bad at naming children. Ursula and Gudrun, really?

Anyway, Ursula grows up to be half-obsessed with Christianity, in a romantic way, and half-hating it, in practice. She suffers from the burden of always representing her family and keeping them up to snuff, when really her nature is to be impulsive. She falls in love first with a 21-yo family friend, Anton Skrebensky, and then when he returns to war (I think Ursula is 17 or 18 at this point), she falls in love again with her 28-yo teacher, Winifred Inger. And they go on a date and then they go skinnydipping in the middle of the night and make out. Yes, really. This book was published in 1915. I’m obsessed. (Sadly, Ursula falls out of love and Winifred marries Ursula’s uncle instead. It was nice while it lasted).

Gudrun is like a wild animal, completely wrapped up in her own internal world and dreams and seemingly unaware of the world of humans she lives in, with an impish lack of regard for social mores and indifference for whether or not she’s respected (as clever or anything else traditionally seen as desirable).

Ursula graduates school and can’t stand living at home� she and her father have a intensely love-vehemently hate relationship, and her mother’s domesticity and delight in her constant pregnancies and obsession with the physical world disgust her� so she gets a job as a 5th grade teacher. She’s all naively excited about it, only to have her ideals shattered by the children, who are dumb as posts and chuck rocks at her outside the schoolhouse. She’s only able to teach them when she abandons her individuality, her thoughtful, pacifist self, and takes on the identity of Schoolteacher and thrashes the worst boy when he misbehaves, scaring the dickens out of the other students until they behaved.

After a year of that, she goes on to college to get a B.A., and her sister Gudrun to art school. Just before Ursula graduates, Skrebensky comes back from his military tour to visit her briefly (though he has to go to India at the end of summer), and they’re in love for a few months and he asks her repeatedly to marry him and she ignores that. They start drifting away and having political arguments (she’s an elitist aristocratic, and he’s all for democracy). Then she tells him she never wants to get married, to him or anyone else, and he can’t handle it, he starts to panic because he knows he has to leave for India soon and she’s not budging.

In the end, she decides not to marry him� “I love him well enough� certainly more than I love anybody else in the world. And I shall never loe anybody else the same again. We have had the flower of each other. But I don’t care about love. I don’t value it. I don’t care whether I love or whether I don’t, whether I have love or whether I don’t. What is it to me? I don’t know [what I do care about]-- something impersonal. Love� what does it mean� what does it amount to? So much personal gratification. It doesn’t lead anywhere.�

After they break up, she thinks she might be pregnant and starts idealizing a life where she marries him after all, but when she realizes she was never pregnant, she recognizes that she never really loved Skrebensky� she had passion for him, but the rest she had created herself.

She walks along a rural path, watching townspeople with utter revulsion and disillusionment, before seeing a rainbow come out, illuminating the provincial village and its people, casting their earthiness in a new light: (hide spoiler)]

She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world’s corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven. She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a loving fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.�