Women in Love 2

by D.H. Lawrence

Published here for the first time is the earliest completed version of the novel regarded as Lawrence's greatest: Women in Love. Lawrence wrote it in 1916 and did his best to have it published then; but his previous novel had been banned and The First Women in Love was rejected. It shares much of its material with the final version of the novel but its central relationships are dissimilar and the ending radically different. Arguably one of Lawrence's greatest works in its own right, it is a novel searingly addressed to the world of the First World War.

Genres: Fiction, Classics

Audio Cassette

About the author

David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English writer of the 20th century, whose prolific and diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism, and personal letters. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, human sexuality and instinct.

Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage." At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel. He is now generally valued as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.H._Law...

Reviews

[Marcus Speh · Rating 5 out of 5]

How strange and wonderful to discover a new (yet old) author & love him so much. First book I ever read by Lawrence. Came upon him through Forster's Aspects of the Novel (also a great book) and found "The First Women In Love" (which actually is the first version of "Woman in Love") in a bookstore yesterday & couldn't stop reading it. Lawrence sets up an almost perfect continuous dream. The way he uses language to draw life, conflict and characters, is astonishing. Fantasy comes in when Ursula suddenly thinks of Gerald Crich as a wolf, "young, unbroached", and of his mother as "an old, unbroken wolf." This scene explodes in the readers face after a most careful setup that was suffocatingly tense and difficult for the characters of Gudrun and Ursula. DHL appears as a true novelist in the sense of John Gardner (On Becoming A Novelist) and bears the marks of "Prophecy", as Forster calls "... an accent in the novelist’s voice. His theme is the universe, or something universal. The characters and events still have a specific meaning within the story, but they also have greater resonances." Grand writing — I haven't looked forward to finishing a book like this in a long time.

A much longer review & commentary on this novel is here on my blog.

[Tatiana · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's not the first time I'm reading it... already studied it for teacher exams in France. But now, I am discovering it , as I live not far from the areas described in the novel. All of a sudden it becomes real in a much different way, and life experience also plays a part in it. if the characters seem to have endless ideological debates , they nevertheless are full of flesh, feelings and ponder about vividly burning issues: how to relate to other, the meaning of life, the mendacity of human existence....

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

pretty coo.