Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics S - D. H. Lawrence [273]
—from the Evening Standard (April 10, 1930)
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Comparing [Lawrence] with Proust, one feels that he echoes nobody, continues no tradition, is unaware of the past, of the present save as it affects the future. As a writer, this lack of tradition affects him immensely.... One feels that not a single word has been chosen for its beauty, or its effect upon the architect of the sentence.
—from The Death of the Moth (1942)
HENRY MILLER
It is against the stagnant flux in which we are now drifting that Lawrence appears brilliantly alive.
—from Max and the White Phagocytes (1938)
Questions
1. In a foreword to Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence wrote, “In point of style, fault is often found with the continual, slightly modified repetition. The only answer is that it is natural to the author; and that every natural crisis in emotion or passion or understanding comes from this pulsing, frictional to-and-fro which works up to culmination.” In the light of these remarks, what do you think of Lawrence’s prose style? Is how he writes as significant as what he writes? Do you think Lawrence even cared about style?
2. Does the novel convince the reader that people have to reinvent love, that relations between men and women have gone radically awry, or that industrialism is to blame?
3. Beyond surface squabbles, why is it that Gudrun and Gerald cannot establish a relationship that is life-enhancing rather than destructive?
4. Why does Birkin so dislike the word “love”?
FOR FURTHER READING
Biography
Ellis, David. D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game, 1922-1930. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Kermode, Frank. D. H. Lawrence. Modern Masters series. New York: Viking, 1973.
Kinkead-Weekes, Mark. D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile, 1912-1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Sagar, Keith. The Life of D. H. Lawrence. New York: Pantheon,1980. ——. D. H. Lawrence: Life into Art. New York: Viking, 1985.
Worthen, John. D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years, 1885-1912. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Criticism
Becket, Fiona. The Complete Critical Guide to D. H. Lawrence. London: Routledge, 2002.
Daleski, H. M. The Forked Flame: A Study of D. H. Lawrence. London: Faber and Faber, 1965.
Fernihough, Anne, ed. The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Holbrook, David. Where D. H. Lawrence Was Wrong about Woman. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1992.
Holderness, Graham. Women in Love. Open Guide to Literature series. Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press, 1986.
Howe, Marguerite Beede. The Art of the Self in D. H. Lawrence. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977.
Meyers, Jeffrey, ed. The Legacy of D. H. Lawrence: New Essays. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1987.
Ross, Charles, L. Women in Love: A Novel of Mythic Realism. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991.
Smith, Anne, ed. Lawrence and Women. London: Vision, 1978.
Williams, Raymond. The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence. 1970. Reprint: London: Hogarth Press, 1984.
Other Works of Interest
Baudelaire, Charles. Selected Poems. Chosen and translated with an introduction by Joanna Richardson. Baltimore, MD: Penguin Classics, 1975.
Eliot, T. S. “Portrait of a Lady” in The Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952.
Kierkegaard, Søren. A Kierkegaard Anthology. 1946. Edited by Robert Bretall. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983.
Other Works Cited in the Introduction
Burgess, Anthony. Flame into Being: The Life and Work of D. H. Lawrence. New York: Arbor House, 1985.
Lawrence, D. H. Sons and Lovers. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003.
——. The Rainbow. Everyman’s Library Series. New York: Random House, 1993.
——. The Selected Letters of D. H.Lawrence. Compiled and edited by James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Moore, Harry, T. The Priest of Love: A Life of D. H. Lawrence. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974.
Oates, Joyce Carol. “Lawrence’s ‘Gotterdammerung