In the Library
Women in Love
D.H. Lawrence, 1920
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 13 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 31
- Length
- Length 180k words
£1.99
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Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their father's house in Beldover.
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- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
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Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy writes the same impossible negotiation between passion and destruction, but his society is more certain of its rules.
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Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë
Brontë matches Lawrence's intensity: love as a kind of violence that transforms or destroys everyone it touches.
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The Rainbow
D.H. Lawrence
Lawrence's earlier novel traces the same fierce struggle between men and women across three generations of one family.
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About the book
Two men bolt the door, strip to the skin, and wrestle by firelight until neither can tell whose limbs are whose. Nothing is spoken; nothing needs to be. That scene carries the question Women in Love turns on: whether two people can come close enough to love without one of them consuming the other. Lawrence sets two couples against it. Ursula loves Rupert Birkin, who wants what he calls star-equilibrium, two separate selves held in orbit rather than the gravitational collapse he believes most love really is. Gudrun takes Gerald Crich, the mine owner who has never wanted anything except to own it outright, his collieries, his body, her. Desire here is weather, something that moves through people and wrecks them, and Lawrence trusts the texture of a single touch to say what his characters cannot. By the time the four climb into the Alps, the cold is already deciding which philosophy can survive being loved.