Women in Love

First encountered in Lawrence`s novel The Rainbow, sisters Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen are now grown-up women living in the English Midlands at the time of the First World War. Each becomes involved in a love affair: Ursula with the misanthropic intellectual Rupert Birkin, and Gudrun with Gerald Crich, a successful industrialist. The contrast between the two relationships – the former happy and fulfilling, the latter tempestuous and violent – facilitates an examination of both the regenerative and destructive aspects of human passion, while the novel`s Alpine climax is revelatory of the intensity of close male friendship. Heavily revised by the author in an attempt to avoid a repeat of the controversy surrounding the publication of The Rainbow, which had been suppressed on grounds of obscenity, Women in Love appeared first in the US in 1920, with a British edition following the next year. Straddling the boundary between nineteenth-century realism and modernism, it was regarded by Lawrence as his most accomplished work, and is considered by many to be the author`s masterpiece.