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Gudrun, too, has undergone a transformation between the two works, though one far less radical than Ursula’s. This is in part because her character was less well developed in The Rainbow, and one had the sense that she is more easygoing than her sister. In Women in Love, Gudrun, as we have seen, is far more unfeeling than any of the other characters, except Loerke, who is on a par with her in emotional insensitivity and even cruelty. But then Gudrun, like Gerald, is bound by symbolism as she is not in The Rainbow. This gives her character a certain determinism, like that of a character in a Greek drama. Lawrence had courage, and it not only took courage for him to depart from the models that he himself created in The Rainbow, but it is a sign of his artistic curiosity to see how Ursula might turn out if she had a new mindset—a determination to reinvent love—that might encourage her to take another direction. We now know how she and Gudrun turn out in Women in Love. They become totally different people than they are in The Rainbow. The approach Lawrence uses in these two works is much like Picasso used when he would take a particular pictorial idea to a certain point and develop that same idea but in new directions, variations on a similar theme.

Critics have charged that Women in Love lacks a precise style or the brilliant technique of Joyce. The passage by Burgess quoted above makes that claim. Lawrence’s enemies made a similar point at the time the novel was released. Even friends, such as John Middleton Murry, were critical of him. Flaubert, whom Lawrence certainly read, and by whom he was clearly influenced in the area of acute observation of reality, both in nature and human relationships, used character to elucidate our understanding of society. However, Flaubert contrived situations, plausible and realistic though they were. For Flaubert, the novel was complex, not unlike a poem, in which precisely the right word must be chosen, the mot juste, and combined with a precise and beautiful rhythm to which the novel itself was subject. There were two poets, both contemporaries of Flaubert’s, who first succeeded in freeing literature from the tight constraints to which Flaubert subjected it. One was a Frenchman, Charles Baudelaire, who is the apostle of modernism. In his poems, but especially in his essays on painting and literature, Baudelaire almost single-handedly dragged romantic literature into the modern era. In defining and liberating the modern, Baudelaire invented the prose poem, a genre Rimbaud would perfect at only twenty years old. The prose poem freed literature of the artificial. It was style that renounced formal style in favor of a far more imperceptible one that employs the rhythms of everyday life. The other poet was the American Walt Whitman, who demonstrated that literary form could be annihilated and poetry would not only still exist, it could even be intensified. From Whitman came the Americans—Pound, the greatest craftsman of the new writers, Eliot, Hemingway, and Stein, all of whom in their way were, as Henry Miller would say about Rimbaud, assassins of the old literature.

In Women in Love, Lawrence took almost equally from these two traditions. From Flaubert and the Symbolists, he took symbolism to give his characters an expanded, if more precisely defined meaning, while in the tradition of the Americans, he let them appear to run free. Though Pound said of Lawrence that he had mastered the modern form before Pound had, it is not true. Pound in his imagist manifesto had decided that the poem should be composed not of feet, as in classical poetry, but of breath phrases, the way that we speak in modulated breaths. This is the technique Lawrence chose for Women in Love; the subject matter and the dialogue as spoken in real life would determine the flow and structure of the novel. This is why to some it appears Women in Love has no structure at all. Great literature, Lawrence came to realize, is the seemingly artless creation of