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—from a letter to Waldo Frank ( July 27, 1917)

JOHN MACY

In Women in Love we have four young people, two men and two women, whose chief interest, for them and for us, is in amatory relations. This is indicated by the title of the story, one of those obvious titles which only a man of imagination could hit upon, so simple that you wonder why no novelist ever thought of it before. Now the erotic relations of people, though a tremendous part of life, as all the great tragic romances prove, are still only part of life. Nobody knows this better than Mr. Lawrence. The first story of the Brangwen family is richer than the second, not because of the proverbial falling off of sequels, not because Mr. Lawrence’s power has declined—far from it!—but because the first novel embraces a larger number of the manifold interests that compose the fever called living. In it there are not only young lovers, but old people, old failures, the land, the town, the succession of the generations, rooted yet restless. Ursula emerges from immemorial centuries of English life, touched with foreign blood out of Poland (when an English novelist wishes to introduce variety and strangeness into the dull solidity of an English town he always imports a Pole, or a Frenchman, somebody not quite English).

Ursula’s background is richer than all her emotional experience. Her father, her grandfather, the family, all the tragi-comedy of little affairs and ambitions, the grim, grey colliery district, the entire social situation, are the foundation and walls of the story, and she is the slender spire that surmounts it all—and is struck by lightning. In The Rainbow she goes to ashes, and in Women in Love she revives, burns again, and finds in her new love a new element of dissatisfaction.

—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