Women in Love - Wikipedia Women in Love From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to navigation Jump to search 1920 novel by D. H. Lawrence For other uses, see Women in Love (disambiguation). Women in Love Title page of the first edition Author D. H. Lawrence Language English Genre Novel Publisher Thomas Seltzer Publication date 1920 Media type Print (Hardcover and Paperback) Pages 536 (first edition hardcover) Preceded by The Rainbow  Followed by The Lost Girl  Women in Love (1920) is a novel by English author D. H. Lawrence. It is a sequel to his earlier novel The Rainbow (1915), and follows the continuing loves and lives of the Brangwen sisters, Gudrun and Ursula. Gudrun Brangwen, an artist, pursues a destructive relationship with Gerald Crich, an industrialist. Lawrence contrasts this pair with the love that develops between Ursula Brangwen and Rupert Birkin, an alienated intellectual who articulates many opinions associated with the author. The emotional relationships thus established are given further depth and tension by an intense psychological and physical attraction between Gerald and Rupert. The novel ranges over the whole of British society before the time of the First World War and eventually concludes in the snows of the Tyrolean Alps. Ursula's character draws on Lawrence's wife Frieda and Gudrun's on Katherine Mansfield, while Rupert Birkin's has elements of Lawrence himself, and Gerald Crich is partly based on Mansfield's husband, John Middleton Murry.[1][2] Contents 1 Plot summary 2 Publication history 3 Reception 4 Adaptations 4.1 Film adaptation 4.2 Radio and television adaptations 5 Editions 6 Literary criticism 7 References 8 External links Plot summary[edit] Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen are sisters living in The Midlands in England in the 1910s. Ursula is a schoolteacher, Gudrun a painter. They meet two men who live nearby, school inspector Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich, heir to a coal-mine, and the four become friends. Ursula and Birkin begin a romantic friendship, while Gudrun and Gerald eventually begin a love affair. All four are deeply concerned with questions of society, politics, and the relationship between men and women. At a party at Shortlands, the Criches' country manor home, Gerald's sister Diana drowns. Gudrun becomes the teacher and mentor of Gerald's youngest sister. Soon, Gerald's coal-mine-owning father dies as well, after a long illness. After the funeral, Gerald goes to Gudrun's house and spends the night with her while her parents sleep in another room. Birkin asks Ursula to marry him, and she agrees. Gerald and Gudrun's relationship, however, becomes stormy. The two couples take a holiday together in the Alps. Gudrun begins an intense friendship with Loerke, a physically puny but emotionally commanding artist from Dresden. Gerald, enraged by Loerke and most of all by Gudrun's verbal abuse and rejection of his manhood, and driven by his own internal violence, tries to strangle Gudrun. Before he has killed her, however, he realises that this is not what he wants, and he leaves Gudrun and Loerke, and climbs the mountain, eventually slipping into a snowy valley where he falls asleep and freezes to death. The impact of Gerald's death upon Birkin is profound. The novel ends a few weeks after Gerald's death, with Birkin trying to explain to Ursula that he needs Gerald as he needs her; her for the perfect relationship with a woman, and Gerald for the perfect relationship with a man. Publication history[edit] After years of misunderstandings, accusations of duplicity, and hurried letters, Thomas Seltzer finally published the first edition of Women in Love in New York City, on 9 November 1920. This had come after three drawn out years of delays and revisions.[3] This first limited edition (1,250 books) was available only to subscribers, due to the controversy caused by Lawrence's previous work, The Rainbow (1915). Originally, the two books were written as parts of a single novel, but the publisher had decided to publish them separately and in rapid succession. The first book's treatment of sexuality was frank for the mores of the time, and, after an obscenity trial, the book was banned in the UK for 11 years, although it was available in the US. The publisher then backed out of publishing the second book in the UK, so Women in Love first appeared in the US. Martin Secker published the first trade edition of Women in Love in London, on 10 June 1921.[citation needed] Reception[edit] As with most of Lawrence's works, Women in Love's sexual subject matter caused controversy. For example, W. Charles Pilley, an early reviewer wrote of it in John Bull, "I do not claim to be a literary critic, but I know dirt when I smell it, and here is dirt in heaps—festering, putrid heaps which smell to high Heaven."[4] Lawrence was sued for libel by Lady Ottoline Morrell and others, who claimed their likenesses were unjustly drawn upon in The Rainbow.[5] The book also later stirred criticism for its portrayal of love, denounced as chauvinistic and centred upon the phallus by the feminist Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949).[6] In contrast, the critic Camille Paglia has praised Women in Love, writing in Vamps and Tramps (1994) that while she initially reacted negatively to the book, it became a "profound influence" on her as she was working on Sexual Personae (1990). Paglia compared Lawrence's novel to the poet Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590). Paglia observed that while Women in Love has "bisexual implications", she is skeptical that Lawrence would have endorsed "full sexual relations" between men.[7] The critic Harold Bloom listed Women in Love in his The Western Canon (1994) as one of the books that have been important and influential in Western culture.[8] Francis Spalding suggested that Lawrence's fascination with the theme of homosexuality is manifested in Women in Love, and that this could be related to his own sexual orientation.[9] In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Women in Love forty-ninth on a list of the 100 best novels in English of the 20th century.[10] Adaptations[edit] Film adaptation[edit] Screenwriter and producer Larry Kramer, and director Ken Russell adapted the novel into the film, Women in Love (1969), for which Glenda Jackson won the Academy Award for Best Actress. It was one of the first American theatrical films to show male genitals, in scenes when Gerald Crich (Oliver Reed) and Rupert Birkin (Alan Bates) wrestle in the nude in front of a roaring fireplace, in several early skinny dipping shots, and in an explicit sequence of Birkin running naked in the forest after being hit on the head by his spurned former mistress, Hermione Roddice (Eleanor Bron). Radio and television adaptations[edit] William Ivory combined Women in Love with Lawrence's earlier novel, The Rainbow (1915), in his two-part BBC Four television adaptation titled, Women in Love (first transmitted 24 and 31 March 2011), directed by Miranda Bowen. The cast is headed by Saskia Reeves as the mother, Anna Brangwen, with Rachael Stirling and Rosamund Pike as her daughters, Ursula and Gudrun. Other cast members include Rory Kinnear as Rupert Birkin, Joseph Mawle as Gerald Crich, and Ben Daniels as Will Brangwen. In this adaptation, Ivory sets the final scenes and Gerald's death not in the Tyrolean Alps, but in South African diamond mines and desert sands, where Gerald walks out in the dunes and meets his demise. BBC Radio 4 broadcast Women in Love as a four-part serial in 1996, dramatised by Elaine Feinstein and starring Stella Gonet as Gudrun, Clare Holman as Ursula, Douglas Hodge as Gerald and Nicholas Farrell as Rupert. It has been repeated several times on BBC Radio 4 Extra, most recently in December 2020.[11] Editions[edit] Lawrence, D.H. (1920). Women in Love (Privately Printed ed.). New York: Thomas Seltzer. Lawrence, D.H. (1921). Women in Love (Trade ed.). London: Martin Secker. Lawrence, D.H. (1982). Ross, Charles L. (ed.). Women in Love. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin. Lawrence, D.H.; Farmer, David; Vasey, Lindeth; Worthen, John (1987). Women in Love (The Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D. H. Lawrence ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawrence, D.H.; Farmer, David; Vasey, Lindeth; Worthen, John; Kinkead-Weekes, M. (1995). Women in Love. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lawrence, D.H. (1998). Bradshaw, David (ed.). Women in Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lawrence, D.H. (1998) [1916–17]. Worthen, John & Vasey, Lindeth (eds.). The First Women in Love (The Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D. H. Lawrence ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-37326-3. (This edition displays significant differences from the final published version.) Lawrence, D.H. "Prologue". The Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D. H. Lawrence. Cambridge University Press. pp. 489–506. (This discarded section of an early version of the novel is set four years after Gerald and Birkin have returned from a skiing holiday, and was published as an appendix to The Cambridge Edition.) Lawrence, D.H. (2007). The First Women in Love. Oneworld Classics. ISBN 978-1-84749-005-6. Literary criticism[edit] Beynon, Richard (ed.) (1997). D. H. Lawrence: The Rainbow and Women in Love. Cambridge: Icon Books.CS1 maint: uses authors parameter (link) Black, Michael (2001). Lawrence's England: The Major Fiction, 1913 – 1920. Palgrave-MacMillan.CS1 maint: uses authors parameter (link) Chaudhuri, A. & Paulin, Tim (2003). D.H Lawrence and 'Difference': Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present (UEA Repository (Book) ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 0199260524.CS1 maint: uses authors parameter (link) Delaney, Paul (1979). D. H. Lawrence's Nightmare: The Writer and his Circle in the Years of the Great War. Hassocks: Harvester Press.CS1 maint: uses authors parameter (link) Leavis, F.R. (1955). D. H. Lawrence: Novelist. London: Chatto and Windus.CS1 maint: uses authors parameter (link) Leavis, F.R. (1976). Thought, Words and Creativity: Art and Thought in D. H. Lawrence. London: Chatto and Windus.CS1 maint: uses authors parameter (link) Oates, Joyce Carol (Spring 1978). "Lawrence's Götterdämmerung: The Apocalyptic Vision of Women in Love". Critical Inquiry. Ross, Charles L. (1991). Women in Love: A Novel of Mythic Realism. Boston, MA: Twayne. Worthen, John & Preston, Peter (ed.) & Hoare, Peter (ed.) (1989). "The Restoration of Women in Love". D. H. Lawrence in the Modern World. London: Macmillan. pp. 7–26.CS1 maint: uses authors parameter (link) References[edit] ^ Kaplan, Sydney Janet (2010) Circulating Genius: John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press ^ "D.H. Lawrence". katherinemansfield.net. Archived from the original on 19 June 2010. Retrieved 13 July 2016.CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) ^ Ross, Charles L. (1979). The Proofs: Censorship and Revision. The Composition of The Rainbow and Women in Love: A History. UP of Virginia. pp. 124–25. ^ W. Charles Pilley (17 September 1921). "Review of Women in Love". John Bull. ^ Ross, Charles L. (1979). The Proofs: Censorship and Revision. The Composition of The Rainbow and Women in Love: A History. UP of Virginia. p. 124. ^ de Beauvoir, Simone. La Deuxième Sexe. p. 229. ^ Paglia, Camille (1994). Vamps and Tramps: New Essays. Penguin Books. pp. 329, 336. ^ Bloom, Harold (1994). The Western Canon. Riverhead Books. p. 522. ^ Spalding, Francis (1997). Duncan Grant: A Biography. pp. 169–170. "Lawrence's views (i.e., warning David Garnett against homosexual tendencies), as Quentin Bell was the first to suggest and S. P. Rosenbaum has argued conclusively, were stirred by a dread of his own homosexual susceptibilities, which are revealed in his writings, notably the cancelled prologue to Women in Love". ^ 100 Best Novels, Modern Library ^ "DH Lawrence - Women in Love, Springtime". BBC. 27 October 1996. Retrieved 3 November 2018. External links[edit] Wikimedia Commons has media related to Women in Love. Women in Love at Project Gutenberg Women in Love public domain audiobook at LibriVox Plot Summary and Analysis at Modernism Lab Essays v t e D. H. Lawrence Novels The White Peacock (1911) The Trespasser (1912) Sons and Lovers (1913) The Rainbow (1915) Women in Love (1920) The Lost Girl (1920) Aaron's Rod (1922) Kangaroo (1923) The Boy in the Bush (1924) The Plumed Serpent (1926) John Thomas and Lady Jane (1927) Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) The Escaped Cock (1929) Mr Noon (unfinished) Short stories and novellas "Odour of Chrysanthemums" (1911) The Fox (1923) The Captain's Doll (1923) The Ladybird (1923) St Mawr (1925) The Princess (1925) "The Rocking-Horse Winner" (1926) "The Woman who Rode Away" (1928) The Virgin and the Gipsy (1930) Short story collections The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (1914) England, My England and Other Stories (1922) Plays The Daughter-in-Law (1913) The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd (1914) Poetry Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923) Travel books Sea and Sardinia (1921) Mornings in Mexico (1927) Sketches of Etruscan Places and other Italian essays (1932) Non-fiction books and pamphlets Movements in European History (1921) Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) Compendiums The Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D. H. Lawrence Penguin Lawrence Edition Related D. H. Lawrence Birthplace Museum D. H. Lawrence Ranch D. H. Lawrence Heritage Centre Frieda Lawrence (wife) Priest of Love (1981/1985 film) R v Penguin Books Ltd The Chatterley Affair Films based on works D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study Authority control BNF: cb11944796f (data) VIAF: 184119980 WorldCat Identities (via VIAF): 184119980 Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Women_in_Love&oldid=1002726922" Categories: Novels by D. H. Lawrence 1920 British novels British novels adapted into films English novels British novels adapted into television shows Obscenity controversies in literature Sequel novels Hidden categories: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown CS1: Julian–Gregorian uncertainty Articles with short description Short description is different from Wikidata EngvarB from September 2013 Use dmy dates from September 2013 All articles with unsourced statements Articles with unsourced statements from July 2016 CS1 maint: uses authors parameter Commons category link is on Wikidata Articles with Project Gutenberg links Articles with LibriVox links Wikipedia articles with BNF identifiers Wikipedia articles with VIAF identifiers Wikipedia articles with WorldCat-VIAF identifiers Navigation menu Personal tools Not logged in Talk Contributions Create account Log in Namespaces Article Talk Variants Views Read Edit View history More Search Navigation Main page Contents Current events Random article About Wikipedia Contact us Donate Contribute Help Learn to edit Community portal Recent changes Upload file Tools What links here Related changes Upload file Special pages Permanent link Page information Cite this page Wikidata item Print/export Download as PDF Printable version In other projects Wikimedia Commons Languages العربية فارسی Français Հայերեն Hrvatski Italiano Македонски Nederlands Srpskohrvatski / српскохрватски 中文 Edit links This page was last edited on 25 January 2021, at 20:05 (UTC). 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