Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics S - D. H. Lawrence [271]
In 1993 D. H. Lawrence’s novel Kangaroo (1923) inspired Australian painter Garry Shead, winner of his country’s prestigious Archibald Prize, to create a series of oil paintings. Lawrence’s semi-autobiographical novel follows two European expatriates as they attempt to find a satisfying community, or “ur-society,” in post_World War I Australia. Shead’s oils depict a bearded Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, in various outback settings, including Lawrence’s house, “Wyewurk,” on the Sidney coast. In “Magpie,” Lawrence sits at his writing table separated from Frieda by a magpie perched on a sea-fronted ledge that frames his small, sun-glanced cottage. To the left of the frame in “Dusk,” Lawrence appears within this same cottage ledge, while Frieda stands outside; Lawrence is effectively fenced in from the bluish twilight, cut off from the community of men snaking through the trees to the right, and the tall, long-eared kangaroo, which occupies the center of the painting in silhouette. Some editions of Lawrence’s Kangaroo now come packaged with drawings from Shead’s highly original series.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
D. H. LAWRENCE
There is another novel, sequel to The Rainbow, called Women in Love. I don’t know if Huebsch has got the MS. yet. I don’t think anybody will publish this, either. This actually does contain the results in one’s soul of the war: it is purely destructive, not like The Rainbow, destructive-consummating. It is very wonderful and terrifying, even to me who have written it. I have hardly read it again. I suppose, however, it will be a long time without being printed—if ever it is printed.
—from a letter to Waldo Frank ( July 27, 1917)
JOHN MACY
In Women in Love we have four young people, two men and two women, whose chief interest, for them and for us, is in amatory relations. This is indicated by the title of the story, one of those obvious titles which only a man of imagination could hit upon, so simple that you wonder why no novelist ever thought of it before. Now the erotic relations of people, though a tremendous part of life, as all the great tragic romances prove, are still only part of life. Nobody knows this better than Mr. Lawrence. The first story of the Brangwen family is richer than the second, not because of the proverbial falling off of sequels, not because Mr. Lawrence’s power has declined—far from it!—but because the first novel embraces a larger number of the manifold interests that compose the fever called living. In it there are not only young lovers, but old people, old failures, the land, the town, the succession of the generations, rooted yet restless. Ursula emerges from immemorial centuries of English life, touched with foreign blood out of Poland (when an English novelist wishes to introduce variety and strangeness into the dull solidity of an English town he always imports a Pole, or a Frenchman, somebody not quite English).
Ursula’s background is richer than all her emotional experience. Her father, her grandfather, the family, all the tragi-comedy of little affairs and ambitions, the grim, grey colliery district, the entire social situation, are the foundation and walls of the story, and she is the slender spire that surmounts it all