Book description
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HOWARD JACOBSON
Women in Love begins one blossoming spring day in England and
ends with a terrible catastrophe in the snow of the Alps. Ursula and
Gudrun are very different sisters who become entangled with two
friends, Rupert and Gerald, who live in their hometown. The bonds
between the couples quickly become intense and passionate but whether
this passion is creative or destructive is unclear. In this
astonishing novel, widely considered to be D. H. Lawrence's best work,
he explores what it means to be human in an age of conflict and confusion.
David Herbert Lawrence was born 11 September 1885 in Eastwood,
Nottinghamshire. His father was a miner and his mother was a
schoolteacher. In 1906 he took up a scholarship at Nottingham University
to study to be a teacher. His first novel, The White Peacock, was
published in 1911. Lawrence gave up teaching in 1911 due to illness. In
1912 he met and fell in love with a married woman, Frieda Weekley, and
they eloped to Germany together. They were married in 1914 and spent the
rest of their lives together travelling around the world. In 1915
Lawrence published
The Rainbow
which was banned in Great Britain for obscenity.
Women in Love
continues the story of the Brangwen family begun in
The Rainbow
and was finished by Lawrence in 1916 but not published until 1920.
Another of Lawrence's most famous works,
Lady Chatterley's Lover
, was privately printed in Florence in 1928 but was not published in
Britain until 1960, when it was the subject of an unsuccessful court
case brought against it for obscenity. As well as novels, Lawrence also
wrote in a variety of other genres and his poetry, criticism and travel
books remain highly regarded. He was also a keen painter. D. H. Lawrence
died in France on 2 March 1930.
