Women in Love (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

Rating:
Summary: If you love Lawrence, read it
Review: "Women in love" is the first Lawrence book i have read in english (all the others in my own language, italian). I think Lawrence, in this novel, more then in "The Rainbow" is at the beginning of a search that will finally bring him to "Lady Chatterley": i mean the search of i life-sens and of the knowledge of the real through the relationships between human beeings, male and female etc. I like more the conceit that emerges from the last Lawrence's books, but i appreciate in "Women In Love" some kind of "scritto giovanile".

Rating:
Summary: Boring Men and the Women Who Love Them
Review: D.H. Lawrence's "Women in Love" features various philosophical ideas, each thinly disguised as a character. They are: the sisters Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen (rolls right off the tongue, doesn't it?), collier's son Gerald Crich, and idealist Rupert Birkin. Eventually Gerald pairs off with Gudrun and Ursula with Birkin. Gudrun and Gerald have a rather violent relationship, in which each partner is always struggling for power. Ursula and Birkin strive to relate on a "higher plane", on some vague cosmic level.

Unlike some readers here, I was not particularly bored by the characters' theoretical discussions on love. More annoying were the exhaustingly detailed descriptions of their actions (to use the word broadly) and thoughts. For long stretches of time nothing much happens and no one speaks.

Presumably the reader is meant to identify most with Birkin, who is very close to Lawrence himself. But if the reader is anything like me, he will instead identify with the minor character of a young girl who drowns in a lake. The reader, too, is drowning, but in a sea of philosophy rather than water. One looks frantically about for a plot to cling to.

Then why does this book deserve any stars at all, much less three? Well, some parts are beautifully written. And there are a number of underdeveloped but quite intriguing ideas: such as the way Gerald's belief in ruthless, triumphant industrialization permeates his romantic life as well. The possibility of love (even erotic love) between men who also love women is explored from time to time, to much interest, then sadly dropped.

In a few places the plot moves along nicely, and sometimes it is quite involving. I don't know if these moments make the entire book worth reading, however.

I should say, to be fair, that "Women in Love" is a sequel/companion to Lawrence's "The Rainbow," which I haven't read. But I doubt that it would have made much difference.

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.