Women in Love was not an easy book to read at the time it was written, and it is not an easy book to read today. D. H. Lawrence wrote it, with exceptional speed, in the late spring, summer, and early .fall of 1916. He had gone into a kind of internal exile in a remote part of Cornwall, forbidden to leave England because of the war, which entered its third year that August, and embittered by the recent suppression, for obscenity, of his novel The Rainbow. The war had appalled Lawrence from the start; by the summer of 1916--during which, at the Battle of the Somme, British troops suffered sixty thousand casualties in a single day--it had become apparent to almost everyone that the conflict was a mass slaughter with no end in view and that little could be hoped from it...

Perhaps no other of the world"s great writers lived and wrote with the passionate intensity of D. H. Lawrence. And perhaps no other of his books so explores the mysteries between men and women--both sensual and intellectual---as Women in Love. Written in the years before and during World War I in a heat of great energy, and criticized for its exploration of human sexuality, the book is filled with symbolism and poetry---and is compulsively readable.

  It opens with sisters Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen,characters who also appeared in The Rainbow,discussing marriage, then walking through a haunting landscape ruined by coal mines, smoking factories,and sooty dwellings. Soon Gudrun will choose Gerald, the icily handsome mining industrialist, as her lover; Ursula will become involved with Birkin, a school inspector---and an erotic interweaving of souls and  bodies begins. One couple "will find love, the other death, in Lawrence"s lush, powerfully crafted fifth novel, one of his masterpieces and the work that may best convey his beliefs about sex, love, and humankind"s ongoing struggle between the forces of destruction and life.

Introduction

Sisters

Shordands

Class-Room

Diver

In the Train

Creme de Menthe

Totem

Breadatby

Coal-Dust

Sketch-Book

An Island

Carpetting

Mino

Water-Party

Sunday Evening

Man to Man

The Industrial Magnate

Rabbit

Moony

Gladiatorial

Threshold

Woman to Woman

Excurse

Death and Love

Marriage or Not

A Chair

Flitting

Gudrun in the Pompadour

Continental

Snowed Up

Exeunt