Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (84 page)

—from the
New York Evening Post Literary Review
(March 19, 1921)

 

EVELYN SCOTT

Women in Love
is not pure as an art form, but it is because art is too limited for Lawrence’s conviction of reality. Lawrence’s poetry seemed out of place in the Imagist Anthology. A number of his contemporaries express finely the delicate nostalgic emotions of neo-classicism, the emotions of nuns. The Parnassian muse, though she speaks of orgies, is a virgin. Lawrence is aesthetically unchaste. His genius has consorted with life and has acquired mystical imperfections, nail-prints in the palms.

—from
The Dial
(April 1921)

 

JOHN MIDDLETON MURRY

Mr. Lawrence is set apart from the novelists who are his contemporaries by the vehemence of his passion. In the time before the war we should have distinguished him by other qualities—a sensitive and impassioned apprehension of natural beauty, for example, or an understanding of the strange blood bonds that unite human beings, or an exquisite discrimination in the use of language, based on a power of natural vision. All these things Mr. Lawrence once had, in the time when he thrilled us with the expectation of genius: now they are dissolved in the acid of a burning and vehement passion. These qualities are individual no longer; they no longer delight us; they have been pressed into the service of another power, they walk in bondage and in livery....

Women in Love
is five hundred pages of passionate vehemence, wave after wave of turgid, exasperated writing impelled towards some distant and invisible end; the persistent underground beating of some dark and inaccessible sea in an underworld whose inhabitants are known by this alone, that they writhe continually, like the damned, in a frenzy of sexual awareness of one another. Their creator believes that he can distinguish the writhing of one from the writhing of another; he spends pages and pages in describing the contortions of the first, the second, the third, the fourth. To him they are utterly and profoundly different; to us they are all the same. And yet Mr. Lawrence has invented a language, as we are forced to believe he has discovered a perception for them. The eyes of these creatures are ‘absolved’; their bodies (or their souls: there is no difference in this world) are ‘suspended’; they are ‘polarized’; they ‘lapse out’; they have, all of them, ‘inchoate’ eyes. In this language their unending contortions are described; they struggle and writhe in these terms; they emerge from dark hatred to darker beatitudes; they grope in their own slime to some final consummation, in which they are utterly ‘negated’ or utterly ‘fulfilled.’ We remain utterly indifferent to their destinies, we are weary to death of them.

At the end we know one thing and one thing alone: that Mr. Lawrence believes, with all his heart and soul, that he is revealing to us the profound and naked reality of life, that it is a matter of life and death to him that he should persuade us that it is a matter of life and death to ourselves to know that these things are so. These writhings are the only real, and these convulsive raptures, these oozy beatitudes the only end in human life. He would, if he could, put us all on the rack to make us confess his protozoic god; he is deliberately, incessantly, and passionately obscene in the exact sense of the word. He will uncover our nakedness. It is of no avail for us to protest that the things he finds are not there; a fanatical shriek arises from his pages that they are there, but we deny them.

—from
Nation and Athenaeum
(August 13, 1921)

 

ARNOLD BENNET

No finer work has been done in our time than Lawrence’s finest. He is not yet understood, even by the majority of his admirers. But he will be; and meanwhile his work must accept injustice. In the future no first editions of present-day writers will be more passionately and expensively sought for than Lawrence’s, unless perhaps Joyce’s. I regard this as certain.

—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)

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”?

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.

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.

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.

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’: The Tragic Vision of ‘Women in Love.’ ” Reprinted in D. H. Lawrence,
Women in Love
. Modern Library. New York: Random House, 1993.

Rimbaud, Arthur. “Delirium I.” In
A Season in Hell
. Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1945.