Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics S - D. H. Lawrence [279]
Russell’s adaptation of Women in Love garnered several Academy Award nominations, including for Best Director, Best Cinematography, and Best Screenplay. Glenda Jackson was chosen Best Actress for her portrayal of Gudrun. The performances of others in the cast are admirable, including Alan Bates and Oliver Reed as Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich, respectively, and Jennie Linden, who plays Ursula. Russell went on to dramatize two other Lawrence novels: a 1989 film version of the prequel to Women in Love, The Rainbow, and Lady Chatterley, a 1993 production for British television in which Russell also plays the role of Lady Chatterley’s father, Sir Reid.
Visual Art
In addition to writing poems, stories, novels, and plays, D. H. Lawrence was an accomplished painter; one of his friends was American landscape artist Georgia O‘Keeffe. During a 1929 visit to Lawrence’s New Mexico ranch, O’Keeffe painted the large pine under which Lawrence liked to write in the morning. Lawrence described this tree as “standing still and unconcerned and alive” with a “green top one never looks at” and a trunk “like a guardian angel.” In “The Lawrence Tree,” O’Keeffe depicted its sturdy character with rusty red oil paint and a perspective that looks upward from the ground, capturing the branches jutting against a blue, starlit sky.
In 1993 D. H. Lawrence’s novel Kangaroo (1923) inspired Australian painter Garry Shead, winner of his country’s prestigious Archibald Prize, to create a series of oil paintings. Lawrence’s semi-autobiographical novel follows two European expatriates as they attempt to find a satisfying community, or “ur-society,” in post_World War I Australia. Shead’s oils depict a bearded Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, in various outback settings, including Lawrence’s house, “Wyewurk,” on the Sidney coast. In “Magpie,” Lawrence sits at his writing table separated from Frieda by a magpie perched on a sea-fronted ledge that frames his small, sun-glanced cottage. To the left of the frame in “Dusk,” Lawrence appears within this same cottage ledge, while Frieda stands outside; Lawrence is effectively fenced in from the bluish twilight, cut off from the community of men snaking through the trees to the right, and the tall, long-eared kangaroo, which occupies the center of the painting in silhouette. Some editions of Lawrence’s Kangaroo now come packaged with drawings from Shead’s highly original series.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
D. H. LAWRENCE
There is another novel, sequel to The Rainbow, called Women in Love. I don’t know if Huebsch has got the MS. yet. I don’t think anybody will publish this, either. This actually does contain the results in one’s soul of the war: it is purely destructive, not like The Rainbow, destructive-consummating. It is very wonderful and terrifying, even to me who have written it. I have hardly read it again. I suppose, however, it will be a long time without being printed—if ever it is printed.