Two sisters walk through a colliery town on their way to a wedding, arguing about love with the frank intensity that will sustain the novel's four hundred pages. D.H. Lawrence's 1920 masterpiece follows Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen through two entangled love affairs that become battlegrounds for competing visions of human connection. Birkin preaches a star-equilibrium of separateness within union. Gerald Crich carries the cold machinery of his mines into every embrace. Lawrence writes the body as no English novelist had before, insisting that the life of the flesh is also the life of the spirit. Banned, reviled, and vindicated, it remains the most radical English novel about what men and women do to each other in the name of love.