Women in Love

Rating:
Summary: The Search for Love
Review: This is an amazing book. I don't think that anyone has ever been so skilled in writing a sentence before than D.H. Lawrence. He writes such poetic prose that he can make a walk in the park the most entertaining scene in a book. It is just beautiful and it is something that is zll too rare in modern lierature. There is one scene when he describes a man and a women walking beside a pond at night and the lady is pulling the petals off of a white flower and throwing them onto the pond. As they float away the picture that Lawence paints in the readers mind is poingant and very descriptively beautiful. The characters are described down to their inner most thoughts and we see them and get to know them better than they know themselves. The y are conflicted, insecure, and hopeful of finding something worth while. Lawrence pulls out the problems that society places on love, mixed with the conflicting human spirit with refreshing honesty. At times the characters drove me crazy as they couldn't make up their minds, they were so capricious. But then people are like that in life, so it fit in well with the main message of the story: searching for the offered love that appeases our trepidations about relationships. I will never view a relationship the same after reading this book as it was so insightful on what we need. More people should read D.H. Lawrence's works as they are lessons to help us define ourselves in a deaper perspective and in a more awake fashion.

Rating:
Summary: Women In Love
Review: This melodramatic novel self-consciously revels in the new freedoms of post-WWI Europe. As a newcomer to Lawrence, I can sense his enjoyment in attacking taboo subjects. Unfortunately, the character development is unconvincing and ultimately condemns the book to an interesting period piece instead of an enduring classic.

Rating:
Summary: A Must To Read...
Review: Well, the feminists hate it, the Christians apparently hate it (check out Irving Nutt's uproarious "review" below)...is there any other way to convey that Lawrence still has the power to provoke?
This is an absolute must for anyone serious about literature....Lawrence tries to stuff the whole dang world into a book. Everything he is trying to achieve here is breathtaking. The characters are all rather deplorable, but there is such psychological insight and empathy towards even the foulest of them, that the reader feels for all these fools. No two readers are going to look at it the same way....Is Crich a pitiable martyr or a ruthless phallocrat? Is Gudrun Lawrence's swat at women in general, or a pre-cursor to the cold, Thatcher-style "feminism". Is it about women in love...or is the romance strictly between the men? This ambiguity makes "Women In Love" absolutely timeless...
... a poetic, violent, and remarkably unsentimental masterpiece.

Rating:
Summary: An endless cycle of humanity encapsulated
Review: Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence is a sequel, but knowledge of The Rainbow is not necessary to appreciate the second novel. The title is somewhat misleading, as it is really about women and men, men and women, and men and men-and it's not always clear with what they are in love. It is the tale of two teachers, sisters Gudrun and Ursula Brangwen, the son of the local mine owner, Gerald Crich, and school inspector Rupert Birkin.

Their complex relationships start to take shape the day of Gerald's sister's wedding, as Gudrun and Gerald and Ursula and Rupert are drawn together, often despite themselves. The Gudrun/Gerald relationship becomes a series of conflicts that are won only temporarily and that lead to more conflicts and then temporary reprieves of tenderness and sex. His emotional conflicts with Gudrun are mirrored in Gerald's dealings with animals; he brutally forces his mare to stay at a railroad crossing despite her terror until blood is drawn and until the cars have passed. Later, when his sister's rabbit resists being picked up so he can be sketched, Gerald punches him in the head so he will submit instantly. His blind will must triumph in all. The only time that he and Gudrun seem to find an equilibrium is when they balance each other by accepting but not gravitating toward each other. It becomes a tenuous relatonship at best and a dangerous one at worst. Gerald is incapable of love, as is his brooding mother.

Meanwhile, Ursula finds herself in a different kind of battle, with Rupert and his self-contemptous philosophies about relationships, death, and the will. His vision of love, if he even believes it exists, is of two planets circling one another in perfect equilibrium. He did not find that with his former lover Hermione, who does not satisfy his physical desires and who does not calibrate with his spiritual needs. At the end of the novel, he reinforces what he has said all along-his love will always have a missing component and be incomplete without it. As a side note, Rupert seems to be Lawrence's own mouthpiece, reflecting many of his own views.

As with Lady Chatterley's lover, the setting for Women in Love becomes a character-the grimy village, the sordid town, the sullen miners and their wives provide a backdrop of inevitable modernization and dehumanization that counterbalances the individual stories. As mining is mechanized to death, so is the human soul. The will either accepts the inevitable crush of the modern world or fights it to the death. The weakest part of Women in Love may be when the setting changes, that is, when the couples decide to leave all that England has become and to take their relationships and their futures to the Alps, where they find art truly does imitate life with its mechanism. The novel seems to lose a little of its footing at this point, giving in to its tendency to become an intellectual exercise in the arts rather than a human story in a regimented world.

Women in Love starts out slowly, as a lengthy series of vignettes and conversations that seem unlikely or unrealistic, but develops a crescendo as the battles begin. In the end, despite dramatic events and drastic changes, the conundrums remain, and even Ursula's persistence and will cannot eliminate them now, let alone forever. Women in Love is about destruction and regeneration in an endless cycle and the human under the surface that we are not entirely aware of and cannot express.

Rating:
Summary: brilliant writer, dreadful book
Review: Women in Love is a very tedious read. Sure, the author does use the English language brilliantly. But perhaps too brilliantly; some passages take repeated reading to understand what is going on!

But the most frustrating aspect of this book is the characters. None of them are the kind of people you'd want to know. And I never met any people who talk drival about love, relationships, their insecurities, etc. Worse, one of the characters is a thinly disguised D.H. Lawrence - and this character is the worst! :-)

I was very disappointed with this novel, but not with its author. With such a rich command of the English language I can only hope that he had put it into better use ... and thus deserving his fine reputation.

Rating:
Summary: a bad daydream
Review: Women In Love is one of the most beautifully written books I have ever read. The author's mastery of the English language is evident on every page.

Women in Love is also one of the most pointless books I have ever read. Sure, there are some very interesting conversations along the way -- but (and a big BUT) everything else smacks of being false and contrived.

Considering its girth, there is very little action in this novel. When there is action it repeatedly springs out of left field. All the action and most of the conversation in this novel suffers from a fundamental disconnection with reality.

Beyond all the other problems of this novel is its flawed premise. Lawrence seems to be saying that the only way modern man can ever escape the world he lives in is to be so passionate as to overcome it. In this, Lawrence seems to be the opposite of a Buddhist. That notwithstanding, Lawrence's theory also fails. How can being passionate overcome a world system based on the passions of men? Just as Buddhist withdrawl from the world of passion can never fix the problems of that world, Lawrence's call for unguided passion would only add fuel to the fire of a broken and fallen world.

In essence, Women In Love is beautifully written, inherently flawed, and marred by the surrealistic motion of the plot. I cannot in good conscience recommend a book this large, which when finished amounts to a bad daydream.

Rating:
Summary: Women In Love
Review: Women In Love written by D.H. Lawrence is not as explicit as his other novels, and instead of concentrating on sexual content, Lawrence chose to depict the relationships between two sisters and their boyfriends. D.H. Lawrence goes deep into the minds of human beings and reveals the real secrets of emotions, feelings, and thoughts that people usually hide inside. Statements such as "The Dead Should Bury the Dead" illustrate the content of living and dying, which the book frequently discusses. The book is difficult and long to read, but it opens up the reader's mind and forces the reader to reavaluate the content of his or her relationship with other people.

Rating:
Summary: Grace and Ambivelance
Review: Women in Love, as the title would suppose, should be about women in love. Herein lies the complexity of Lawrence: the novel is about men in love, who only through there female counterparts, are able to foster the emotional disposition necessary for what they really strive for, namely, each other.

Meet Birkin, a morose and exasperated cynic, who is tired of Aristocratic English life and wants something more, deeper, spiritual. However, this 'spirituality' he is so fond of is not that of religion, but of 'sensuality', which in this particular novel is the code-word for 'sexuality'. His rather heated and ambivalent relationship with Gerald, his strong, virile, and confident friend, borders on homo-erotic. (In one memorable scene, the two men get naked and 'wrestle' eachother.)

However, Birkin and Gerald are technically straight, and acquire amorous relationships with Ursula and Gundrun, respectively. The women are independent minded artists, who despite their strong personalities, wrestle with the idea of marriage, and the subordination that goes along with it. This implicates a broader theme of the book: Being trapped- whether it be by gender roles, love, desire, one's country, social economic standing, etc. All four characters suffer the peril of their own stagnation, trying to transgress any boundary they can, which in this book, between their bodies.

The novel was infamously banned by England upon publication, and was only printed for subscribing Americans. Some of the most vivid parts of the book are the sex scenes, which are not necessarily 'graphic', but highly suggestive, using words like, 'erect, explode, release, etc.'

Lawrence is remembered as a troubled man (he had an Oedipal relationship with his mom, some suggest). His characters are gritty, obtuse, even crass. Yet he writes about nature with the compassion and earnestness of Thoreau and Woodsworth. Lawrence is not a philosopher of the cerebral, but of the visceral- be it human bodies or nature. For Lawrence, union between all things is only possible where the irrational counters the rational. This novel investigates such polarities.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent, but not for everyone
Review: You shouldn't read this book if you are looking for a light read. The reviewer below is correct: it is an "intellectual merry-go-round", in the sense that it makes one feel that one is reading a Platonic dialogue without knowing which voice speaks for Plato. This makes it challenging, but not a bad book. However, I disagree with the reviewers who call it dark and depressing--did they take a close look at the blossoming relationship between Ursula and Birkin? This relationship seems to be a hope, making this tale no more depressing than the legend of Pandora's box. Finally, although it seems "unreal" at first for the characters to foster such intense emotions about little things, this is in keeping with the turn-of-the-century zeitgeist and the metaphysical nature of the work. Lawrence's descriptive talent is amazing and his point is good.