281 reviews for:

Women in Love

D. H. Lawrence

3.45 AVERAGE

Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes
challenging dark emotional reflective slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

smr's review

3.0

As my first D.H. Lawrence book, I liked it overall. I didn't mind the many philosophical discussions--I thought they were quite interesting, even if I didn't agree with all of them (though one, about life being pointless, did resonate with my pessimistic self). I think I hoped for more of a focus on the two sisters, but I guess the "in love" part had to kick in.

As much as I enjoyed reading this, though, I just don't think it's something I'd want to reread. But I liked it enough to want to read more Lawrence.

DNF-ing this 200 pages in because the reality is that I will not be able to finish it. The blatant patriarchal views and the utter arrogance of the two main male characters just make it difficult for me to go on.

The fact that every time a woman says something she is cut short and the man's reply starts with "No" while he attempts to enlighten the poor damsel of the mysteries of the universe, that HE had got access to because of his nightly ravings and deep introspective abilities that no woman could EVER hope to achieve in any of the possible worlds.

Liked the pessimism of it all, humans really are a damned horrible lot, but when a white (not straight, though) man says it and repeats it every five lines and becomes passive aggressive when a woman dares share her view, I just have to close the book and decide life is too short to deal with stupid books.

Don't know whether this Lawrence guy really was a sexist, but frankly I don't care; I'm sick of excusing misogyny on basis of "those were the times" or "but he is iRoNiC!" or whatever. We do have astounding unproblematic classics: let's read those instead simply because no one has to adjust anything when praising them. If you are a racist/sexist/xenophobic literary genius, then you aren't a genius.

And you aren't worth the time.

This book left me so confused. It kept getting more confusing as I kept reading it. And still, I enjoyed it and I'm definitely going to be reading more of D.H. Lawrence's works.
Oh, this book also had a lot of quotes I fell in love with. Mostly from Rupert Birkin.♡

The first full novel I've read by DH Lawrence and I can now say he's one of my favourite writers. I am absolutely in love with his writing style and he has such depth to all of his characters and their discussions.
I really cannot wait to read more by him!

biaseelaender's review

4.0

I'm just going to post part of the paper I wrote on this book for those who may need some references/insights when writing their own papers--really hope this helps.

As English essayist Geoff Dyer explains in his 1997 biography of Lawrence/ anti-biography of Lawrence “Out of Sheer Rage: Struggling with D.H. Lawrence”, the small town where he grew up was a far cry from beauty. His father, a miner by profession, accounts for Lawrence’s status as an autodictate author.
As Dyer describes his stride about town, whose touristic attractions include the D.H. Lawrence Birthplace Museum (“everything about the interior suggested that homes aspired to the appearance of mines”) and a D.H. Lawrence trail taking you to some Lawrence-related sites (apart from the schools he frequented or taught at, which were demolished to make way for a new supermarket in 1971).
It is only by understanding how greatly this environment affected Lawrence that we can get a sense of the rush of impressions waiting to be canvassed into writing. One needs not look twice at Dyer’s description in order to see its reflections in Women in Love:
The countryside around Nottingham, the mines an aberration (…). Yet the real crime of nineteenth century industrialism seemed to him ‘the condemning of its workers to ugliness, ugliness, ugliness: meanness and formless and ugly surroundings, ugly ideals, ugly religion, ugly hopes, ugly love, ugly clothes, ugly furniture, ugly houses, ugly relationships between workers and employers.’. These days we scarcely even notice ugliness. We notice its absence.
And, later, at Dyer’s ironic comment:
In a way, though, it was difficult to imagine a more fitting tribute to Lawrence than present-day Eastwood. Whingeing about the ugliness of Eastwood is somehow to wish all writers grew up in Knole Castle. Lawrence grew up in this ugly little town and the best monument to him is its ugliness. [DYER, Geoff. 1997].
Perhaps we should cite one of the many passages (according to Kindle searching results, 35) these descriptions echo:
“There is not only NO NEED for our places of work to be ugly, but their ugliness ruins the work, in the end. Men will not go on submitting to such intolerable ugliness. In the end it will hurt too much, and they will wither because of it. And this will wither the WORK as well. They will think the work itself is ugly: the machines, the very act of labour (…).”[D. H. Lawrence. Women in Love (Centaur Classics) (p. 324). Kindle Edition.]
In addition, right in the beginning of the novel, we are already hit with a sense of things displaced, as the returning Gudrun notices in the town sordidness without poverty, as if it were hiding its even uglier nature. Indeed, one ponders about Gudrun’s self-punishing nature (“It was strange that she should have chosen to come back and test the full effect of this shapeless, barren ugliness upon herself.”). Later in the novel, such a desire of ugliness is seen as some sort of wicked fascination with it- which, indeed, all characters harbour to some extent; although Ursula’s seems more articulated if only for her aesthetic inclinations.
In having its characters, much like the town itself, hide their Freudian perversions inside, Women in Love is able to account for all of the unrealized latencies so thoroughly described throughout the novel.
‘It is like a country in an underworld,’ said Gudrun. ‘The colliers bring it above-ground with them, shovel it up. Ursula, it’s marvellous, it’s really marvellous — it’s really wonderful, another world. The people are all ghouls, and everything is ghostly. Everything is a ghoulish replica of the real world, a replica, a ghoul, all soiled, everything sordid. It’s like being mad, Ursula.’[(p. 4). Kindle Edition.]
From this carefully crafted mesh of impressions, one gets a sense of eternal recurrence, in which the dust of a seemingly pointless underworld is continuously dug up in order to cover up the dust that came before it. This allegory leads us to a number of places- mostly the more general interpretation that anything that matters in here is covered up by layers and layers of an amorphous variety of dirt and sand and whatever else makes for unpaved paths. It all leads up to the Freudian notion of the Subconscious- that whatever was in the surface does not matter as much as the inner-most impulses of these characters.
Of course, this description provides one also with a sense of reflux and disembowelment, generated by the continuous ploughing through the soil- with a shovel- of whosever’s insides or guts we are exploring at the moment.
These ideas bring us to an interesting sort of poetic displacement- that of exile in one’s own land (“‘And how do you find home, now you have come back to it?’, she asked”). Because the land is always changing like the dunes in the desert, Gudrun’s knowledge of her home is almost non-existent.
Furthermore, the use of words such as “ghostly”, “ghoulish”, and “replica” to describe the town more than once throughout the novel reflects not only the excerpt taken from Geoff Dyer’s book but also Raymond William’s more academic examination of Lawrence’s work in his 1973 book The Country and the City:
For it is not the town but the false town that is the symptom of ugliness, and the root of its falseness is the system and spirit of possessive individualism,
[Williams, Raymond. The Country And The City (Vintage Classics) (p. 267). ]
According to Williams, what Lawrence seems to be pushing for in the conception of his work is unbound vitality, “breaking from within this harsh, disintegrated and alienated world”- hence his description of Hermione Roddice as someone who is at the same time lacking in spontaneity and utterly obsessed with it. She is the embodiment of the paradox between authenticity and culture, being and the self-violating consciousness of being. That is, if such a word like “embodiment” could be used to describe a character whose tragedy is to have her head so stuck in a rarefied world of ideas that her very physical existence seems as fragile as a projection- like the town, like the unrealized impulses described all over the novel, even like the results of actions that seem, apart from the psychological reactions they generated, somewhat beside the point. Everything is happening somewhere else.
It is not surprising that the object of her affections, Rupert Birkin, is infinitely annoyed by her; she reminds and forces him to acknowledge such a dilemma. Lawrence was almost as tortured by this issue as Birkin, and Williams sees Women in Love as his greatest template to explore it:
It is difficult to reconcile because this is not in the end an argument, a position; it is the creative record of so many impulses, in the contradictory pressures of the time. Lawrence saw almost everything with a passionate but tearing insistence. He was pulled, deeply, between a physical commitment, which he described more intensely and convincingly than anyone in his generation, and an intellectual commitment, which made him respond and reason in a critical world. There is the world of the flower, as he so often described it, but there is also the world of the cell under the microscope, giving a new insight into the deepest living processes. The social contradictions—unconscious being, conscious community—are intense and severe.
[Williams, Raymond. The Country And The City (Vintage Classics) (pp. 267-268). Random House. Kindle Edition.]
Williams, throughout this essay, is very clear about this aspect of Lawrence’s body of work- that it cannot be reduced to an argument or a stance, but rather to a sort of registering of what he thought our more authentic, “primitive” emotions. Williams finally decides that, for Lawrence, the opposite of the City was not the Country, but some sort of wilderness punctuated by the human body. The language used in this passage of the third chapter, when Birkin visits Ursula’s classroom, seems to call for a conciliation of contradictive images- interestingly enough, such images are in direct relation to those used by Williams:
What’s the fact? — red little spiky stigmas of the female flower, dangling yellow male catkin, yellow pollen flying from one to the other. Make a pictorial record of the fact, as a child does when drawing a face — two eyes, one nose, mouth with teeth — so —’ And he drew a figure on the blackboard. (p. 23).
The obsessive differentiations made throughout the novel- between the body, the mind, and the soul- are only necessary as long as one provokes the other into being, and all characters battle in (mostly sexually) charged dialogue. One thinks of Birkin, a character so preoccupied with “soul maintenance”, who despises Hermione Roddice because he thinks her soul is reduced to her mind- and yet he cannot rid himself of his own mind, for it is his mind that grants him a soul. So he must conciliate them.
Thus comes Hermione’s answer to his attempt a few pages later:
‘When we have knowledge, don’t we lose everything but knowledge?’ she asked pathetically. ‘If I know about the flower, don’t I lose the flower and have only the knowledge? Aren’t we exchanging the substance for the shadow, aren’t we forfeiting life for this dead quality of knowledge? And what does it mean to me, after all? What does all this knowing mean to me? It means nothing.’
The use of the word shadow here conveys it perfectly- and that goes beyond reflecting the recurring theme of falseness and the underworld. One could of course deduce an object from its shadow: here, the issue of “the loss of innocence” caused by knowledge comes to life. Effectively, she worries that a world made of faint facts will slip away into a projection- a ghostly replica of the real world which should inspire feeling and provoke thought.
The discussion of whether children should be taught is one that irritates Birkin precisely because neither he nor Hermione are able to conjecture a world where innocence and knowledge coexist. The Nature of something is no longer relevant to us once it is revealed, after all. Whereas a mind is incapable of reverting into its prior state of not knowing, this Nature will never shrink back to what it was before we noticed it.
This might just be the old Berkeley problem: to be is to be noticed, and in order to be noticed one must depend on others, which makes depending on others part of its very Nature- thus making it impossible to pinpoint the exact Nature of anything.
When we, for instance, ask kids to circle one given element- you have a fish and a rock and a house; and you ask them to circle the rock, you are suggesting there is a world beyond this rock.
There is a concept separated from the body of what is already a representation. Of course this is due to a linguistic process, but the linguistic process is an epistemological one- when you name something, you are taking something from it.
Names give boundaries- you start to define it not by what it IS but for what it is not. This somewhat translates the volatile impressions, the underground battles occurring all the time in the novel’s dialogues. Lawrence, however, will do what very few up until then had done and, like the colliers, dig all of those unrecorded, fleeting thoughts, and expose those people in all of their volatility. Ironically enough, volatility is what they seemingly most want; if only they could have it on a schedule.

summed up: 'everything had become simple again, quite simple, the complexity gone into nowhere.' p.349

it wasn't bad it was just too damn long

Apparently, this is a sequel to another book but that is completely none of my business and I don't care I read it as a stand-alone and understood everything just fine.

I was really interested in this book and for the first 30ish percent, I thought it was going to be a four-star read as it had me pretty gripped. I thought the characters were really interesting and dynamic. It’s wonderfully written, and the plot was intriguing. It did get to a point though where I felt a lot of it was pointless drabble that added nothing at all to the story and made it drag a bit.

I love the writing, honestly DH Lawrence really just makes me think and captures humanity so perfectly and it shows in the way these characters think and talk to each other. He had such an interesting world view, especially for the time this was written, and some of these sentences and conversations were brutally honest and relatable. I especially liked how it completely picked apart the sanctity of marriage and how the way we live is so rigid and exhausting that its undesirable – can honestly say not much has changed on that front. It was also literally packed with homoerotic subtext which I was a) not expecting and b) completely enthralled by. The tension between those two characters got me every time.

I'm not gonna lie and pretend I’m some sort of scholar though, some of the tangents that this book went on seemed a bit intellectual for me and I didn't fully understand historical context so many paragraphs were going over my head. There were several occasions I read something and didn’t actually understand so just carried on and hoped it wasn’t important. Oopsie.

The ending was so bittersweet, and really surprised me to be honest. I was completely unprepared for the many turns it was going to take, it was a bit of a rollercoaster. Glad I read this, but I still think I prefer Sons and Lovers.

gcbf's review

5.0

I found the book dreamy. I'm a sucker for beautiful language and Lawrence is a master at it; his unexpected vocabulary kept me hooked right throughout. The first half I adored, but the second half just seemed a bit of a drag - was it really necessary to have all those meaningless conversations? Likewise the philosophy in the first half was thought-provoking and lovely, but by the second half it had slipped to something of a showing-off; Lawrence seemed to be questioning everything thoughtlessly and stirring no wonder in the reader.
Gudrun and Gerald's relationship I found intriguing, Ursula and Birkin's not so much - but I suppose that was what the book was about. It raised many questions for me about the logistics of love, but more questions about the nature of humanity. Overall, a very interesting and beautiful book, but perhaps bogged down a little by the end.