Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics S - D. H. Lawrence [281]
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)
Questions
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”?
FOR FURTHER READING
Biography
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.
Criticism
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