David Herbert Lawrence

Women In Love David Herbert Lawrence

In Women in Love (1920), Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, who first appeared in Lawrence's earlier novel, The Rainbow, take centre stage as Lawrence explores their growth and development in their relationships with two powerful men, Rupert Birkin and his friend Gerald Crich. A novel of regeneration and dark, destructive human passion, the book reflects the impact on Lawrence of World War I in the potential both for annihilation and salvation of the self. Quintessentially modernist, the novel is one of Lawrence's most extraordinary, innovative and unsettling works. Lawrence actually completed this tale in 1916, the year after the The Rainbow fiasco - in which copies were ordered by a magistrate to be destroyed under the Obscene Publications Act. As for Women in Love, almost every publisher in London refused the manuscripts. Methuen (publisher of The Rainbow) cancelled their contract with Lawrence after reading it, and Duckworth also refused to accept the novel for publication.