ŷ������

If you haven’t read Lawrence before, go back! Don’t read this novel first! It’s sort of a 500 level course of a novel, not because it’s difficult, but because it takes more patience and commitment, acquired only from some positive Lawrence experiences.

D.H. Lawrence started writing about the two Brangwen sisters in 1913, pairing them with the males in this book, Gerald and Rupert, but then he developed the sister’s background and family story. It grew into a huge tale, so he split it in two, and published the background story, The Rainbow, in 1915. The negative reaction to that one, including suppression and banning, delayed publication of the second part, Women in Love, until 1920.

These sisters were presented to us as unique and interesting feminist creatures in The Rainbow, but here they have morphed into poor excuses for human beings, something that made me angry through most of the book, but did I stop reading? Of course not! I love Lawrence, and think anything he writes is brimming with significance and poetic value. I was pissed though.

The story takes place in England around the outbreak of the First World War. There’s no explicit mention of the war, but Lawrence explores themes of life over death; choosing passion (love and art) over being a cog in the military/industrial complex; and when faced with the choice between the peace of an agrarian society and the mechanization of an industrial one, deciding to carve out a brand new option.

Lawrence seems to be channeling his poetry differently in this one. There aren’t pages of descriptions of flora and fauna here--he applies his poetry instead to ideas, and gives us primarily conversations (though there are plenty of flowers metaphorically popping up, and animals with strong symbolic meaning).

I don’t have the literary chops to analyze this properly, but I will say, contrary to the title, this is not about women in love. Women being infuriatingly childish, maybe, but primarily, one man’s need to conquer and another man’s wrestling with the problem of how best to exist with other humans, how to be fulfilled, how to love.

The characters are quite a foursome.
Ursula Brangwen: ��'I think it’s much better to be really patrician, and to do nothing but just be oneself, like a walking flower.’��
Gudrun Brangwen: “She was not satisfied--she was never to be satisfied.��
Gerald Crich: “What he wanted was the pure fulfilment of his own will in the struggle with the natural conditions."
Rupert Birkin: “She knew all the while, in spite of himself, he would have to be trying to save the world.��

I didn’t believe anybody was really in love with anybody here, with one exception, a relationship that carries the novel and gives what I found a surprisingly beautiful and hopeful ending.

~~~~~
Some of my favorite evocative, provocative, thought-provoking lines:
“The two sisters were like a pair of scissors, snipping off everything that came athwart them; or like a knife and a whetstone, the one sharpened against the other.��

“There is a real impersonal me, that is beyond love, beyond any emotional relationship. So it is with you. But we want to delude ourselves that love is the root. It isn’t. It is only the branches. The root is beyond love, a naked kind of isolation, an isolated me, that does not meet and mingle, and never can.��

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

“You have never worked for hunger, or you would know what god governs us.��

“She was rarely alone, he pressed upon her like a frost, deadening her.��

“Oh God, the wheels within wheels of people, it makes one’s head tick like a clock, with a very madness of dead mechanical monotony and meaninglessness.��