Women in Love

Rating:
Summary: Women In Love
Review: Gerald Crich
a rich
stud won
Gudrun
(Poorly chosen:
He got frozen
out)
Ursula
lacked her colour
but for Birkin
threw her work in
(Same old plot:
they tied the knot)

Rating:
Summary: One of the greatest books I have ever read
Review: I could scarcely tell you the plot of this novel because the plot isn't important. What's important is that through the various interactions of his characters, Lawrence has probed straight to the fascinating, familiar and disturbing core of human emotion. Lawrence's writing is so beautifully, skillfully crafted (in spite of the occasional overuse of repetition) and so intimately incisive that I found myself pausing to read certain passages over and over again. This one is definately a keeper.

Rating:
Summary: I must be missing something
Review: I couldnt' stand these people- usually I don't mind books of great reflection and little action, but these people were dreadful! I'll try again sometime, but not when I'm dealing with unlikeable people in real life.

Rating:
Summary: Give it a chance, and take your time.
Review: I do love this book. Don't read this book if you are looking for popcorn reading because you will be very disappointed. The book is comprised of moments, moments, moments...and reflection. It examines various aspects of love, destructive love and sensual experience. It examines sensuality as being the core of ourselves, and all forces of action as being derived from this. It examines the blurring of the lines. If you allow this book to inform you, it will.

Rating:
Summary: Slow start, gets better.
Review: I finished this book on the second try. It's wordy - focusing more on the psychological turmoil of the characters than in physical action. Hence most of the time they sit around and talk to each other or sit around and stuggle internally with their own beliefs and emotions. If this book hadn't been such a "classic", I would have given up on it. However, I forced myself to continue and found after struggling through the first 75 pages, that I really enjoyed the characters and found Lawrence's views on the nature of humanity and love intriguing and relevant.

Rating:
Summary: Keep reading--it gets great!
Review: I found the first couple hundred pages slow going. My mistake was to read it before The Rainbow, which I also intend to read, since it too is on the Modern Library panel's list of the best novels writtten in English in ths centruy. But I found when I finished the book I thought it well worth reading, even tho the characters are too cerebral for a commonsenseical person such as I think I am.

Rating:
Summary: Very offensive
Review: I had just started the "humanities" requirement for my degree program and was assigned this book to read for a literature course. I did not expect, from the title, that it would be a book for a Christian, but I believe in respecting authority, so I tried to read the book. But I was not able to finish it. It was so dark and full of all kinds of morbid things, that were almost as bad as the pornography. It had no redeeming feature. I felt ashamed while I was reading it, and it was so bad that even the places which were all right seemed suspicious. I thought, how will he find something weird and ugly here? This book was written back when England was full of labor unrest and socialism and paganism and what they called "free love" so I suppose this had something to do with it.
Some of the Christians in my class wanted to complain to the Dean about a hostile study environment for Christians, but we were afraid of retribution by secular humanists.

Rating:
Summary: I would give it 3 1/2 stars actually
Review: I read Women in Love over the summer and upon finishing it I decided that it is not a bad book. Granted, there were many times that I was looking at my watch and page numbers to see if I read enough of what I decided to read. There were many chapters that were really uninteresting and hard to read in their dullness. But conversely, there were many extremely well-written and facinating chapters that, for me, made up for the bad ones. I'd say that half the chapters have some kind of redeeming quality for the other half.

I do not really like British literature very much anyway, and people 100 years ago did write differently. But the relationship between Gudrun and Ursula as well as Birkin and Gerald was very intersting to watch unfold. I felt that I could relate to Birken the most, in his quest for anything close to an ideal, to have both Ursula and Gerald, as platanic friends and lovers, as companions . . .to have that relationship without the mask of gender which does not set the limitations on the possibilities between two people's relationship.

Of course that is an ideal which can never really be in our non-perfect world. The chapters when they take their trips to London, or when Birken and Gerald wrestel, or finally after the marriages when they go to Germany are the best to read. I love their conversations that seem so profound to the characters at the time, when really they are the kind things that anyone that thinks would talk about.

This book has a lot of bad qualities, but also a lot of good ones, which help balance it and I would recommend it to some people, not all.

Rating:
Summary: Emotionally Intense
Review: I think Women in Love must be just about the most emotionally intense book I've ever read. D.H. Lawrence conjures his four main characters in what feels like the heat of a closed-room kiln. The writing is beautiful and amazingly perceptive, but is at times stultifyingly over-analytical.

Yet, despite the book's combined length, density and decided lack of plot, Women in Love is surprisingly readable. What makes this book so good is the honesty with which Lawrence imbues his two title characters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, and their two chosen lovers, Birkin and Gerald. It can be frustrating to read page after page of the mental thrashings of an individual mind's search for truth and authenticity in life and in love, but it can also be a kind of revelation.

These characters think differently about the world around them than I do, and we each think differently about the world than you who are reading this do. And yet we are all basically the same on a certain transcendent level. We are all human and we all long for an authentic connection with the world around us. We are different and we are the same. That's why living in this world isn't always easy, and that's why it's always worthwhile. This book beautifully and even entertainingly captures those basic struggles for human connection and if for that reason alone, it's well worth reading. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Way too much theatre and not nearly enough play!
Review: I was tricked into reading this book due to it being a well known classic and from a desire to read a good romantic story which I thought it would be. Well, um, IT'S NOT.

I like to read books that draw me right into the story and then a couple of hours later you notice you are turning page 250 when the last you recall touching was page 97. This book was not like that at all. Unfortunately, I was always conscious that I was reading print from a page but kept reminding myself that a book this famous had to get good sooner or later. Far from not being able to put it down, I found myself often looking to see what page I was on and if I had read my quota for the night. It never did get good and when I had finished the last sentence I felt frustrated and cheated.

I worried that my lack of appreciation for this classic must be due to my inferior intellect and that I must after all be just some obtuse hill-billy. Thankfully I found that several people who had offered their reviews here shared my opinions for this book and I was quite relieved that I was not alone in my reaction.

For me, Lawrence's supremely descriptive, possibly brilliant (although I really wouldn't know) and flowery writing is all for not because of selfish, unlikeable and unbelieveable characters who don't really do anything. At the very end, the only care I had for anyone in the book was poor little Winifred. I hope she was alright.

In conclusion may I suggest that you pass on Women in Love and read instead Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy. It is so much more a wonderful book about believable, likeable, women in love.