Women in Love: Cambridge Lawrence Edition [Mass Market Paperback]

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.

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.

"Women in Love" is a book about individual philosophies, personalities, desires, and the conscious or subconscious need for control in relationships. It involves four characters--Gerald, the wealthy and powerful coal industry magnate; Birkin, the intellectual, nomadic bohemian; Ursula, a school-teacher and sister to Gundrun; and Gundrun, the beautiful, emancipated "modern lady" who is a school teacher and artist.
The book follows the course of the relationships between Gerald & Gundrun and Birkin & Ursula from the time when they first eye each other until the point where the relationship either transcends to something larger or comes to an end. There is also made reference to the desire of a relationship between Gerald & Birken spiritually and possibly sexually.
This book does not adhere to a strict timeline or follow a distinct plot. Certain chapters consist of inner musings of a character or dialogue between a few people to give you hints of their personalities. There are times when a series of paragraphs may lead you to believe that the author is simply musing over his own ideas and that the character thinking them is not the point. It's almost as if this book were a venue for Lawrence to channel some of his thoughts to an audience by way of a creation of characters that may or may not be extremely significant. Reader be forewarned: large portions of this book are personal philosphy, poetic and mystical.
I liked this book because I was able to see it for, I think, what it was meant to be. It wasn't intended to be a boy meets girl and read on to see what happens. It wasn't meant to make you fall in love, cry out of pity, or delight in the human spirit. The plot is nonessential. It was meant to show us how certain people would act in certain circumstances and to make us think how we would react in similar situations and to bring out musings that may or may not lie within our own subconscious. It means for us as readers to identify with or loathe certain traits in people and possibly to tell us why they think or feel the way they do. Read with an open mind and be prepared to get to know yourself.