‘I do think,’ he said, ‘that the world is only held together by the mystic conjunction, the ultimate unison between people — a bond. And the immediate bond is between man and woman.’
(Rupert Birkin, sounding like his creator, Women in Love, page 169)

‘Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself.’
(More Birkin wisdom)

‘One must be free, above all, one must be free. One may forfeit everything else, but one must be free.’
(Gudrun, voicing Lawrence’s fundamental position)

‘The Rainbow’ and ‘Women in Love’ are not so much novels as overwhelming, mind-blowing experiences.

Originally Lawrence conceived of ‘The Rainbow’ and ‘Women in Love’ as one massive novel which would have been as long as War and Peace. It was his publisher, Methuen, who persuaded him to break it into two (still very long) works of 500 or so pages each. In the event, what with the negative reviews and then the official banning of ‘The Rainbow’, Methuen chose not to publish the sequel, in fact Lawrence had trouble placing it until the American publisher Martin Secker brought it out, in a privately subscribed edition, in 1920.

‘The Rainbow’ is a masterpiece at least in part because the first half describes the lives of farmers in their part of the West Midlands in a kind of timeless, elemental style, making the figures almost like mythical figures who live close to the land, and this legendary power is carried over into the more modern, mundane life of the final figure in the novel, Ursula Brangwen, who carries echoes and shades of the murky ancestors with her.

‘Women in Love’, by contrast, starts in the recognisable modern world of cars and collieries, trains and trams and work, making its lead figures, the two oldest Brangwen sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, thoroughly modern women, at home in the world of universities, art school, managers, cities, trains, London and Paris. So it lacks the mythical depth and resonance of the first novel.

It starts some years after ‘The Rainbow’ ends because Ursula has been teaching at Willey Green grammar school ‘for some years’ (p.9), whereas she hadn’t started that job at the end of ‘The Rainbow’, and Gudrun is back from three years art school in London, whereas she hadn’t left in ‘The Rainbow’.

Ursula is 26, Gudrun is 25. They are wondering what to do with their lives and the novel opens with them having a half-hearted conversation about marriage.

They decide to visit a wedding they know is taking place that morning. The walk to the church through the ugly industrial town places them class-wise, because they have to walk through working class miners’ areas where the miners’ wives stare at the pair in their bright fashionable clothes, and children shout abuse. They are both a class above their setting.

The wedding introduces us to three more key characters: firstly to the two young men the sisters fancy, being:

Gerald Crich who Gudrun passionately fancies. He is heir to the local mining business, a commanding man and presence – ‘fair, good-looking, healthy, with a great reserve of energy. He was erect and complete, there was a strange stealth glistening through his amiable, almost happy appearance’.

Rupert Birkin who Ursula fancies:

She craved for Rupert Birkin. When he was there, she felt complete, she was sufficient, whole… If only Birkin would form a close and abiding connection with her, she would be safe during this fretful voyage of life. He could make her sound and triumphant, triumphant over the very angels of heaven.

Rupert is one of the school-inspectors of the county.

What’s a little surprising about both these men is we aren’t shown the girls first meeting them, bumping into them again, getting to know them and so on. The novel opens with both girls fully committed to their crushes on both men.

The third character is the dashing, fashionable, tall, slow, reluctant woman with a weight of fair hair and a pale, long face, named Hermione Roddice, a friend of the Criches.

She was the most remarkable woman in the Midlands. Her father was a Derbyshire Baronet of the old school, she was a woman of the new school, full of intellectuality, and heavy, nerve-worn with consciousness. She was passionately interested in reform, her soul was given up to the public cause. But she was a man’s woman, it was the manly world that held her.

And:

a tall queer, frightening figure, with her heavy fair hair slipping to her eyes.

The plot revolves around an apparently endless number of meetings, conversations and debates between these five central characters.

Lawrence’s hyperbole

A terrible storm came over her, as if she were drowning. She was possessed by a devastating hopelessness.

As with ‘The Rainbow’, the characters’ feelings are portrayed as evanescent, ever-changing and, crucially, extreme. They flash from one extreme to another even as we watch:

Birkin’s eyes were at the moment full of anger. But swiftly they became troubled, doubtful, then full of a warm, rich affectionateness and laughter.

Or cohabit in extremes of contradiction.

A wonderful tenderness burned in him, at the sight of her quivering, so sensitive fingers: and at the same time he was full of rage and callousness. (p.346)

She could not believe—she did not believe. Yet she believed, triumphantly (p.372)

Gudrun looked at Ursula with steady, balancing eyes. She admired and despised her sister so much, both! (p.493)

The simplest argument can lead to characters hating each other.

He could feel violent waves of hatred and loathing of all he said, coming out of her. It was dynamic hatred and loathing, coming strong and black out of the unconsciousness. (p.116)

Some event or conversation leaves a character so tortured she wants to die. Hermione listens to Birkin explaining why he’s copying the design of a Chinese vase and her reaction is way over the top:

She suffered the ghastliness of dissolution, broken and gone in a horrible corruption. And he stood and looked at her unmoved. She strayed out, pallid and preyed-upon like a ghost, like one attacked by the tomb-influences which dog us. And she was gone like a corpse… (p.99)

Ursula bursts into tears and doesn’t know whether from joy or misery. Rupert and Gerald sometimes love, sometimes hate, sometimes admire and sometimes despise each other, neither of them, nor the reader, can predict their ever-changing moods.

‘Gerald,’ Birkin said, ‘I rather hate you.’
‘I know you do,’ said Gerald.

Of course he had been loving Gerald all along, and all along denying it. (p.231)

Hermione loves Birkin but at the same time:

She hated him in a despair that shattered her and broke her down, so that she suffered sheer dissolution like a corpse, and was unconscious of everything save the horrible sickness of dissolution that was taking place within her, body and soul.

In fact the Italian Contessa staying with Hermione, explicitly points this out after dinner:

‘Look,’ said the Contessa, in Italian. ‘He is not a man, he is a chameleon, a creature of change.’ (p.103)

Nobody has any control over their feelings. Nobody has the smooth detachment, the stiff upper lip, the gift for under-statement which was supposed to characterise the English. Lawrence’s metier is over-statement. I noticed early on that the most recurring emotion is fear.

If only Birkin would form a close and abiding connection with her, she would be safe during this fretful voyage of life. He could make her sound and triumphant, triumphant over the very angels of heaven. If only he would do it! But she was tortured with fear, with misgiving.

This kind of hyperbole occurs on every page.

Suddenly [Ursula] started. She saw, in the shaft of ruddy, copper-coloured light near her, the face of a man. It was gleaming like fire, watching her, waiting for her to be aware. It startled her terribly. She thought she was going to faint. All her suppressed, subconscious fear sprang into being, with anguish.

Sometimes she [Ursula] had periods of tight horror, when it seemed to her that her life would pass away, and be gone, without having been more than this.

Gudrun went on her way half dazed. If this were human life, if these were human beings, living in a complete world, then what was her own world, outside? She was aware of her grass-green stockings, her large grass-green velour hat, her full soft coat, of a strong blue colour. And she felt as if she were treading in the air, quite unstable, her heart was contracted, as if at any minute she might be precipitated to the ground. She was afraid.

Hermione and Ursula look at some luxury shirts but when Hermione comes near her, Ursula panics:

Hermione came near, and her bosom writhed, and Ursula was for a moment blank with panic. And for a moment Hermione’s haggard eyes saw the fear on the face of the other… overcome with dread… (p.104)

Why? Because this is how all Lawrence’s characters feel, constantly overwhelmed, falling into panics or despairs, tortured by the never-ending intensity of their feelings.

There are other feelings, lots of them, I just noticed how often fear dominated. One of the few criticisms I’d make of Lawrence is I dislike it when this hyperbole makes him use the word ‘insane’. He does mean feeling something to an extent which is almost deranged but use of the word makes me draw up short, and realise how preposterous he’s being.

The result was a nasty and insane scene with Halliday on the fourth evening.

Why not just say ‘The result was a nasty scene with Halliday on the fourth evening’? Most of Lawrence’s hyperbole I can take, but his references to insanity and madness grated.

The book’s worldview

By chapter 4 I began to realise that every chapter (more or less) contains at its core an argument, two or more characters getting into a debate about something or other. Characters in other novels have conversations which move the plot along, but in Lawrence – certainly in this book – very often they start talking purely in order to have a 6th form debate about a Big Issue. The five central characters are all very opinionated and at the drop of a hat start arguing.

The fundamental premise of Lawrence’s worldview seems to be that God is dead and so people have to make their own values, figure out how to live their own lives. The God is dead premise is obviously key but only made explicit once, by Birkin, the Lawrence avatar.

‘And you mean if there isn’t the woman, there’s nothing?’ said Gerald.
‘Pretty well that – seeing there’s no God.’ (p.64)

Part of the statement’s impact is its throwaway nature. In the later nineteenth century hundreds of novels and autobiographies featured Great Debates about the existence of God or the devil, the protagonists’ agonising about their Loss of Faith etc. But here, around 1915, is Lawrence simply dismissing all of that. It’s a non-subject. Junk. Thus freed, we have to get on with living our best lives.

Mind you, Birkin goes quite a long way beyond a sensible atheist humanism. Lawrence gives him extreme views, regularly positing the end of humanity. With characteristically Lawrentian contempt, he wonders if humanity’s time has come? It would be a good thing.

Birkin looked at the land, at the evening, and was thinking: ‘Well, if mankind is destroyed, if our race is destroyed like Sodom, and there is this beautiful evening with the luminous land and trees, I am satisfied. That which informs it all is there, and can never be lost. After all, what is mankind but just one expression of the incomprehensible. And if mankind passes away, it will only mean that this particular expression is completed and done. That which is expressed, and that which is to be expressed, cannot be diminished. There it is, in the shining evening. Let mankind pass away — time it did. The creative utterances will not cease, they will only be there. Humanity doesn’t embody the utterance of the incomprehensible any more. Humanity is a dead letter. There will be a new embodiment, in a new way. Let humanity disappear as quick as possible.’

An opinion which is repeated right at the end of the novel. But this is just one character’s opinion, Birkin, the most negative of the quartet: ‘His dislike of mankind, of the mass of mankind, amounted almost to an illness.’ (p.66)

Gerald’s worldview is less vivid and memorable because he lives it; he is the embodiment of masculinity, virile and in control, a manifesto in action. It’s easy to quote Birkin as if he represents Lawrence’s view, but really the book’s worldview is generated by the dialectic between Birkin the gloomy theoriser and Gerald the confident man of action; and that’s before you bring in Ursula, Gudrun and Hermione, who all contribute to its complex weft of opinions. The difference between a lecture or manifesto, and a work of art, is complexity and ambiguity.

Chapter 1. Sisters

Introducing Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, sitting chatting about whether they’ll ever get married before they set off walking through their ugly industrial town to see an actual wedding. This features the two men they fancy, coalmine owner Gerald Crich and county school inspector Rupert Birkin. The groom is late and there’s an odd moment when he arrives, sees, his bride on the path to the church, and then makes a mad dash to try and beat her to the door.

Chapter 2. Shortlands

The wedding reception is held at the Criches’ family home, Shortlands, where we see Gerald confidently hosting the party (his father retires ill) and see him and Birkin interacting with guests, notably the breezily confident Hermione Roddice. Gerald, Rupert and Hermione have a three-way argument about race and nationality:

‘Do you think race corresponds with nationality?’ she asked musingly…

Chapter 3. Class-room

Ursula at work teaching children about the structure of catkins. She is startled by the arrival of Birkin and then, unexpectedly, Hermione. Hermione and Birkin have an argument, she saying education makes children too conscious and stops them behaving spontaneously.

‘Isn’t the mind—’ she said, with the convulsed movement of her body, ‘isn’t it our death? Doesn’t it destroy all our spontaneity, all our instincts? Are not the young people growing up today, really dead before they have a chance to live?’
‘Not because they have too much mind, but too little,’ he said brutally.
‘Are you sure?’ she cried. ‘It seems to me the reverse. They are over-conscious, burdened to death with consciousness.’
‘Imprisoned within a limited, false set of concepts,’ he cried.

So far, every chapter has featured a kind of central debate or argument. I wonder if this is the pattern for the book.

Chapter 4. Diver

Ursula and Gudrun go for a walk to the local lake, Willey Water, come to a lake and see a naked man run off a jetty and dive in. It is confident Gerald. They’re both jealous of men’s freedom.

‘God, what it is to be a man!’ [Gudrun] cried.
‘What?’ exclaimed Ursula in surprise.
‘The freedom, the liberty, the mobility!’ cried Gudrun, strangely flushed and brilliant. ‘You’re a man, you want to do a thing, you do it. You haven’t the thousand obstacles a woman has in front of her.’

Ursula tells Gudrun the terrible story of Gerald accidentally shooting his brother dead with a rusty old gun when they were boys. Then they comes across Hermione out for a walk with Laura. After Hermione greets, converses a bit then wanders off, Gudrun says how much she admires her, but Ursula is dead set against her.

The two sisters were like a pair of scissors, snipping off everything that came athwart them; or like a knife and a whetstone, the one sharpened against the other. (p.56)

The sisters jokily tell each other that they are a thousand times more intelligent and beautiful than Hermione, let alone the masses in the street.

‘Strut,’ said Ursula. ‘One wants to strut, to be a swan among geese.’
‘Exactly,’ cried Gudrun, ‘a swan among geese.’

Chapter 5. In the Train

Birkin has to go to London by train. On the platform he bumps into Crich and they’re more or less obliged to travel together. As in every preceding chapter there is a debate. Gerald has been reading a newspaper leader which argues that ‘there must arise a man who will give new values to things, give us new truths, a new attitude to life, or else we shall be a crumbling nothingness in a few years, a country in ruin’. This triggers Birkin to say all such announcing of plans is just playing; what we need to do is tear up society, starting by tearing up ourselves. Lawrence’s characters’ opinions are always vehement but often don’t really make sense:

‘We are such dreary liars. Our one idea is to lie to ourselves. We have an ideal of a perfect world, clean and straight and sufficient. So we cover the earth with foulness; life is a blotch of labour, like insects scurrying in filth, so that your collier can have a pianoforte in his parlour, and you can have a butler and a motor-car in your up-to-date house, and as a nation we can sport the Ritz, or the Empire, Gaby Deslys and the Sunday newspapers.’ (p.60)

Disappointingly this morphs into Birkin asserting that the meaning of life is love, that he wants the finality of a definitive love.

‘The old ideals are dead as nails – nothing there. It seems to me there remains only this perfect union with a woman – sort of ultimate marriage – and there isn’t anything else.’

It’s on this journey that Birkin expresses his dislike of people and his contentment if all of humanity were wiped out, quoted above.

He tells Gerald he stays with a man in Soho, Halliday, and mixes with a Bohemian crowd. Interesting to read how little the profile of this type has changed in the last hundred years:

‘Painters, musicians, writers – hangers-on, models, advanced young people, anybody who is openly at outs with the conventions, and belongs to nowhere particularly. They are often young fellows down from the University, and girls who are living their own lives, as they say.’

The most significant changes would be that nowadays such a crowd would be 1) diverse and multicultural and 2) LGBTQ+ and gender fluid.

Chapter 6. Crème de Menthe

Later the same day Gerald meets Rupert in a Bohemian cafe. The latter is chatting to Minette (Minny) Darrington, small, bobbed hair, with a lisp, nicknamed ‘the Pussum’.

Her ex-boyfriend, Halliday, an old Etonian, turns up. He chucked her and told her to go to the countryside when he learned that she’s pregnant but she refuses. Others join the table, Maxim Libidnikov and Julius who Lawrence has Minette rather unnecessarily tell us is a Jew.

Gerald is more and more attracted to her wanton behaviour and sits pressed up against her in the taxi they get to Halliday’s house (the flat where Birkin bunks down when in London) where they are surprised by the illiterate Arab servant he’s taken in off the streets. Bohemia, darling.

Chapter 7. Totem

Next morning in the same apartment, Gerald wakes up. Going into the main room he is surprised to find Halliday and Maxim naked in front of the fire. Bohemia. Rubert has his bath and, after he’s followed, Gerald adopts the manners of the house and comes out naked. He goes into the bedroom where he obviously slept with Minette. Her eyes are chaotic. She is like ‘a violated slave’ which arouses Gerald all over again but he realises he has to separate himself from her.

They go about their business for the day, and all reassemble to go to a music hall that evening, then back to Halliday’s flat. Gerald hangs on for two more days but the group become more fractious until Halliday provokes Gerald one evening and Gerald is on the verge of punching his face in before he turns and leaves.

Thus Minette achieves her aim, which was to make Halliday jealous and make him love her again and, hopefully, get him to marry her. This she has achieved by the time Gerald leaves.

Chapter 8. Breadalby

Breadalby was a Georgian house with Corinthian pillars, standing among the softer, greener hills of Derbyshire, not far from Cromford. It is Hermione Roddice’s family home, set in landscaped ground. She invites Ursula and Gudrun to stay. Also staying are Birkin, a young Italian Contessa, young athletic-looking Miss Bradley, Sir Joshua, a dry Baronet of fifty, and a woman secretary, a Fräulein März, young and slim and pretty. Later arrive Hermione’s brother, tall debonaire Alexander Roddice, a Liberal MP, who arrives along with Gerald Crich.

Edwardian lunch presented by servants under the lovely old elm tree in the garden while the characters witter about education. Tea and a walk round the grounds. Hermione loves Birkin but realises that he’s come to hate her and a break is coming.

Gorgeous dinner with all the ladies wearing fashionable dress. Followed the staging of an impromptu ballet in the style of the Russian Ballet of Pavlova and Nijinsky, the servants bringing down Hermione’s gorgeous Oriental costumes, Alexander playing the piano.

Next morning they go skinny dipping in the ponds in the grounds, except Ursula and Gudrun and Birkin. Gerald gets his kit off at the drop of a hat. He knows how handsome and male he looks. After lunch a discussion about whether the old social values have collapsed in which case, what news ones are emerging? Gerald thinks people should and will be defined by the role in society, their job. Their private lives will remain private. Birkin objects that there is no social equality. Birkin feels people are as different and self sufficient as stars.

Later, he goes to Hermione’s boudoir, feeling he had been rude. He sits quietly and reads while she writes letters but in fact she is flooded by a vast wave of hatred, suddenly she realises Birkin is standing in her way and only eliminating him can she be free. So she takes a lapis lazuli paperweight and cracks it down on his skull with all her might. Fortunately her fingers get in the way masking a lot of the blow. She raises it again but Birkin ducks under his book and crabs out of the room.

Instead of going looking for medical help he walks out of the house across the grounds and into a wood where he strips naked and rolls in the grass and flowers then walks through a young pine wood deliberately letting the needles sting him, experiencing an epiphany of the post-human world. Is he mad? Who cares.

He climbed out of the valley, wondering if he were mad. But if so, he preferred his own madness, to the regular sanity. He rejoiced in his own madness, he was free. He did not want that old sanity of the world, which was become so repulsive. He rejoiced in the new-found world of his madness. It was so fresh and delicate and so satisfying.

Eventually, dressed again, he staggers to the railway station and catches a train home where he is laid up in bed with concussion.

Chapter 9. Coal-dust

Two scenes. In the first Ursula and Gudrun go for a walk to the coalminers’ town, are delayed at a closed level crossing while a long train shunts by and up rides Gerald Crich on a horse, a beautiful mare, which panics at the very loud noise of the clanging carts and rears and bucks and terrifies the sisters while Gerald enjoys mastering the poor terrified beast.

The second half describes Gudrun’s addiction to walking the working class colliers quarters, especially in Friday night when they get paid and get pissed in the pubs. She pairs off with an electrician named Palmer, a fairly educated man, they promenade, go to the movies, but are never really an item.

Chapter 10. Sketch-book

The sisters go to a remote part of Willey Water to sketch. Who should appear but a rowing boat rowed by Gerald containing Hermione. Domineering Hermione asks to have a look at Gudrun’s sketchbook but bickers with Gerald and the book falls into the lake, Gerald reaching out and into the water to retrieve it. Hermione makes a dramatic show of being sorry, while Gudrun wants the book back, and Gerald a) despises Hermione b) is taken with Gudrun’s pride. And this incident establishes a link between them. it establishes Gudrun’s ascendancy over Gerald.

Chapter 11. An Island

Meanwhile Ursula has wandered along a stream which feeds the lake up to a big mill pond where she finds Birkin trying to fix a punt. Only leaking a little the punt bears him and Ursula out to a muddy little island. Here Birkin lets rip with his nihilistic misanthropy.

‘I abhor humanity, I wish it was swept away. It could go, and there would be no absolute loss, if every human being perished tomorrow. The reality would be untouched. Nay, it would be better. The real tree of life would then be rid of the most ghastly, heavy crop of Dead Sea Fruit, the intolerable burden of myriad simulacra of people, an infinite weight of mortal lies.’
‘So you’d like everybody in the world destroyed?’ said Ursula.
‘I should indeed.’
‘And the world empty of people?’
‘Yes truly.’

Ursula stands up for the importance of love (alas) while Birkin rudely dismisses it as just another human emotion, appropriate in some situations not in others. She starts to dislike and even to hate him, ‘priggish and detestable’.

Birkin says he’s renting rooms at the mill which is empty. If he could he’d chuck in his job (school inspector) and live there by himself like a hermit, away from the mankind he loathes so much. Hermione’s threatened to furnish the rooms for him. He tells Ursula it’s over between him and Hermione, not that there was anything anyway. Ursula tells him she hates Hermione anyway.

Chapter 12. Carpeting

Still at the mill they find Gerald and Hermione in the building itself. Hermione offers to help Birkin measure the rooms and then offers him a valuable carpet which he tries to reject. He hates being dominated and owned by her. Neither of them mention her attacking him with the paperweight.

The landlady of the mill, Mrs Salmon, makes tea for them all. Over tea Ursula brings up Gerald’s beastly behaviour to the mare at the level crossing which triggers a debate about whether animals have lives of their own or exist solely to serve human purposes.

Birkin comes in with the idea that horses have two wills, one which wants to submit utterly to man, another which rebels and wants to be completely free. Not uncontroversially, he goes on to say the same about women.

Hermione and Ursula wander of while the men bicker about horses, and agree that they both dislike Birkin’s anatomising and botanising, he’s always opening and dissecting rather than leave life be.

Chapter 13. Mino

The Mino is Birkin’s cat. Following their ‘clicking’ at the watermill, Ursula goes to visit Birkin at his flat. They almost immediately start arguing. Birkin insists he doesn’t believe in love but in something much deeper, in penetrating to your essential self and making a primeval bond with another essential self.

The argument is interrupted when Birkin’s tom cat goes through the French windows into the garden to confront a wild she-cat and cuffs her. Ursula yells at it to stop being a bully but Birkin sympathises with his cat’s wish to create a stability.

‘It is the desire to bring this female cat into a pure stable equilibrium, a transcendent and abiding rapport with the single male. Whereas without him, as you see, she is a mere stray, a fluffy sporadic bit of chaos.’

Back in their flat, they carry on their argument, Birkin demanding something far beyond love, Ursula unable to see it and saying he’s being obstinate and obtuse. Eventually she wins, beating him down and getting him to say ‘I love you’ in the classic style, embracing and kissing her.

Chapter 14. Water-party

The Criches hold a big midsummer party on the lake, with a motor launch and some rowing boats, all sporting lights and lanterns, the launch letting off fireworks, people laughing aboard the boats or strolling through the grounds or sitting in groups. The water side of things is being hosted by manly Gerald.

Ursula and Gudrun attend, walking there with their mother and father (Will and Anna from The Rainbow). They are intimidated by all these strangers and ask Gerald for a hamper and a canoe and paddle far away from the crowds. They beach it in a hidden spot, strip off and skinny dip, finally emerging, drying themselves. Then Ursula sings while Gudrun performs a eurhythmic dance.

Ursula interrupts this by pointing out some cattle have approached but undaunted Gudrun confronts them, dancing, outfaces them and makes them run off. At this point Gerald and Rupert appear, having tracked them down. Gerald and Gudrun go up the hillside in pursuit of the cattle leaving Ursula and Rupert to fall deeper in love.

Up the hill Gerald tells Gudrun that it’s dangerous to drive the Highland bullocks, she says ‘I suppose you think I’m afraid of you and your cattle, don’t you?’, Gerald asks her ‘why’ and, for answer, she hit him round the face. These passionate Bohemians.

Back at the lakeside the quartet clamber into two dinghies to head back and are laughing and joking when they hear shouts across the water. It’s quite dark now and someone has fallen overboard the launch. Gerald makes Gudrun row fast to the place, the skipper of the launch tells him about where the girl went overboard. She was followed by her young doctor boyfriend who jumped in to save her. Gerald strips down and jumps into the freezing water.

In brief, he dives again and again till he’s exhausted but can’t find them. Birkin pulls him out and rows him to the jetty, where he can barely stand. Gerald apologises to his father who’s appeared, and orders Birkin to drain the lake. So Rupert sets off with Ursula to the lock-keeper’s cottage where he gets the key to the sluices and laboriously opens them, releasing the lakes water into overflow channels. Slowly the levels sink.

Walking back, Birkin explains to Ursula his odd ideas about death, about needing to escape this life, slough it off like an old shell etc.

Unexpectedly in the middle of the road he stops and gives her exquisitely gentle and sensitive bunny kisses. A bit further down the road, not to be outdone, she pulls him towards her and gives him more traditional passionate kisses. They both experience an efflorescence of lust.

Then she goes home and Birkin goes back to the lake to find Gerald still supervising the search and the scouring of the water. He says he can’t sleep till they find the bodies which they eventually do. The young woman, Diana Crich, had panicked and thrown her arms round the boy’s neck so tight it choked him, and so they both drowned.

A page describes how, on that Sunday morning, word spreads throughout the colliery community and all the working class men, women and children are abuzz with the tragedy, imagining the feelings of the people at Shortlands, ‘the high home of the district.’

Chapter 15. Sunday Evening

All that day and into the evening Ursula waits for Birkin to come. She is now fully in love with him. But he doesn’t and as dusk comes she sinks into a deep depression, really deep, page after page thinking about dying and death and what comes after death, thus:

How beautiful, how grand and perfect death was, how good to look forward to. There one would wash off all the lies and ignominy and dirt that had been put upon one here, a perfect bath of cleanness and glad refreshment, and go unknown, unquestioned, unabased. After all, one was rich, if only in the promise of perfect death. It was a gladness above all, that this remained to look forward to, the pure inhuman otherness of death.

Eventually, at the children’s bedtime, he arrives, coming in out of the rain. He helps Ursula get a few of the younger children ready for bed. Then her mum and dad return from church. She is furious with him and gets into an argument about him neglecting his body, making it poorly (i.e. neglecting the battery by Hermione). When he finally leaves she is overcome by hatred of him. See what I mean by Lawrence characters veering from burning love to virulent hatred, from snogging Birkin on Sunday morning to hating his guts by Sunday night.

When he was gone Ursula felt such a poignant hatred of him, that all her brain seemed turned into a sharp crystal of fine hatred. Her whole nature seemed sharpened and intensified into a pure dart of hate. She could not imagine what it was. It merely took hold of her, the most poignant and ultimate hatred, pure and clear and beyond thought. She could not think of it at all, she was translated beyond herself. It was like a possession. She felt she was possessed. And for several days she went about possessed by this exquisite force of hatred against him. It surpassed anything she had ever known before, it seemed to throw her out of the world into some terrible region where nothing of her old life held good. She was quite lost and dazed, really dead to her own life.

Chapter 16. Man to Man

Birkin has a recurrence of illness. He lies in bed which allows Lawrence to give him a great fantasia of wild thoughts. Birkin hates lots of things. He hates the idea of married love, ‘horrible privacy of domestic and connubial satisfaction’. He hates sex because it is so limiting, it makes the sexes dependent on each other. He hates women’s need:

always so horrible and clutching, she had such a lust for possession, a greed of self-importance in love. She wanted to have, to own, to control, to be dominant.

In the ideology of love and sex men and women are considered fragments who can only be made whole by the other. Birkin dreams of a world where men and women are always whole and voluntarily associate as entirely whole.

Gerald comes to visit. The death of the young couple triggers a discussion about death, about the impact on Gerald’s family, then on whether the youngest daughter, Winifred, should be sent away to school.

Both men feel such a closeness that Birkin, bubbling with silly ideas, suggests they swear Blutbruderschaft like the old German knights used to, to swear to love each other all their lives. The novel is titled ‘Women in Love’ but the complicated love between Birkin and Gerald is just as central.

Birkin floats the idea of Gudrun being hired as a private tutor to young Winifred. Aha.

Chapter 17. The Industrial Magnate

After experiencing such closeness, Gerald now fades out of Gudrun’s mind. She dreams of getting away from England. She writes to friends in Munich and Petersburg to see if they could help or put her up.

Ursula and Gudrun visit a working woman who makes honey, ‘Mrs Kirk, a stout, pale, sharp-nosed woman, sly, honied, with something shrewish and cat-like beneath.’

Mrs Kirk was also a wet nurse to the Crich children and remembers what a little devil Gerald was. Any normal person might find this sweet and funny but Gudrun, with Lawrentian melodrama, has a fit, is overcome with rage, and wants the woman ‘ taken out at once and strangled’. Sometimes you feel like telling Lawrence’s characters to calm down, take a breath, count to 10 and everything will be better. But there’s no point. Everything about his world is ramped up to maximum. The spectacular insights into complex human nature, the moments of intense feeling, as well as the staggering nature poetry, all are part of the same package.

Up at Shortlands Mr Crich the patriarch, Thomas Crich, is slowly dying and Lawrence describes his retreat from the world and his own life. He had always treated his workers well, considering them as superior to him, closer to God. But in this had to fight his wife, Christiana, ‘like one of the great demons of hell’. Specifically, he encourages the poor to come and claim charity while Christiana, filled with hatred, drives them away like a witch. Something like hatred and terror exists between them (!)

The dying father’s last thoughts are to secure the wellbeing of Winifred, his youngest, favourite child, several pages on her wilful, anarchistic character. Meanwhile, as his father dies, Gerald feels more and more exposed. He’s managed the business well with his father as mentor and protector. Once he’s gone, Gerald will be fully exposed. We learn what wasn’t obvious up to now, which is that the last few months have changed Gerald: under the influence of 1) the death of Diana 2) Birkin’s visions and 3) Gudrun’s love he’s ceased to be a mechanical old Tory, doors have opened in his mind, he’s become confused.

The chapter goes back to describe Gerald’s boyhood, education, wanderlust, off to uni in Germany, serving in the war, exploring in the Amazon, before returning to take up the family business. He sees the world as instrumental to the will of man. This is the exact opposite of Birkin, who fantasises about nature freed by the complete extermination of man.

Man was the archgod of earth. His mind was obedient to serve his will. Man’s will was the absolute, the only absolute. (p.251)

Lawrence describes industrial strife, the colliers striking for more pay which led to lockouts which led to marches, riots, and soldiers being sent to the most troublesome pit, Whatmore, shots fired, a miner shot dead. This broke old Man Crich’s heart but excited Gerald, who was a boy.

In brief: as Gerald takes over the business he reforms it from top to bottom, sacking all the old managers, bringing in new professionals and equipment from America, scrapping all the perks and charities his father had introduced, overhauling it and making it a modern profitable business.

Lawrence presents it in moralising, general terms, as the triumph of the modern machine ethic over the old organic one. The triumph of Gerald’s heartless Fordian mechanical efficiency over his dying father’s old-fashioned Christian Victorian paternalism.

Chapter 18. Rabbit

Mr Crich agrees for Gudrun to come to Shortlands regularly as an art tutor for Winifred. The latter expects her to be yet another servant but quickly learns they are to be equals. They sketch Einnie’s Pekinese dog, Looloo. Gerald turns up after a few days and they realise they are both in love. The strange incident of them getting out the family’s huge pet rabbit from its hutch. It’s called Bismarck and is a monster, going into a frenzy wherein it badly scratches both Gudrun and Gerald before they get it to a courtyard with grass where it settles down to feed.

Chapter 19. Moony

Birkin goes to recuperate in the South of France leaving Ursula bereft.

She despised and detested the whole show. From the bottom of her heart, from the bottom of her soul, she despised and detested people, adult people.

She takes a walk up to the mill pond as night is falling and sees the big moon reflected in the water. Then it is smashed by someone throwing a stone in, and another, repeatedly breaking the moon into fragments. It is, of course, Birkin, who has come back without telling anyone.

She makes themselves known and they have a hell of an argument because she simply wants him to say I love you while he has a difficult-to-understand, rarefied theory of two people existing together without needy things like ‘I love you’ etc, he wants ‘the paradisal unknowing’. He mocks it as her war cry.

But then she reaches out her hand to his and their bodies take over. They kiss again and again and Birkin gives in and says ‘I love you’.

Next day Birkin has doubts about his entire attitude. It’s connected with a 2-page meditation on the truth revealed by the African sculptures in Halliday’s flat, some truth cold northerners have reached. Suddenly he knows he must propose to Ursula so goes to Beldover. She’s out so he explains his intentions to her father, Will Brangwen.

This goes badly. While they wait, Brangwen and Birkin get into an argument. Brangwen has raised his children Christian like him and doesn’t want to see the girls throw themselves away. Birkin is nettled by all of this. When Ursula arrives from the library it’s her father who tells her Birkin is there to propose, reducing Birkin to inaudible mumbling. This inauspicious manner leads Ursula to bridle and then accuse them both of trying to railroad her, at which Birkin gets up and leaves.

Over the next few days Ursula and Gudrun are very close and dissect Birkin’s character, a preacher. But then there’s a reaction against her sister and she finds herself pondering what kind of love she wants from Birkin.

She wanted unspeakable intimacies. She wanted to have him, utterly, finally to have him as her own, oh, so unspeakably, in intimacy. To drink him down—ah, like a life-draught… But only on condition that he, her lover, loved her absolutely, with complete self-abandon.

This is a central crux so worth lingering on:

She believed that love far surpassed the individual. He said the individual was more than love, or than any relationship. For him, the bright, single soul accepted love as one of its conditions, a condition of its own equilibrium. She believed that love was everything.

Birkin has a model of the self where love is one among many attributes which bring out and complete the self. For Ursula, love is bigger than all individuals and we must submit ourselves to it.

Chapter 20. Gladiatorial

The famous chapter describing Rupert and Gerald wrestling in front of the fire. Straight after walking out of Ursula’s house after the proposal fiasco, Birkin walks up to Shortlands, to find Gerald standing in front of the fire in his drawing room, bored to tears.

They get talking about how to alleviate boredom: there’s work, intoxicants, women or… Birkin suggests fighting. Gerald says he shared a house with a Japanese wrestling expert in Heidelberg and offers to show Birkin jiu-jitsu. So Gerald gets the butler to bring sandwiches and soda, to close the door and leave them undisturbed.

And so they strip naked and wrestle. Modern sensibilities look for the homoerotic in the scene, which may well be there, but Lawrence is primarily concerned with the spiritual or psychological aspects. The actual wrestling lasts just four paragraphs. In the fifth one Gerald lies back on the carpet exhausted, faints and Birkin passes out over his body. When Birkin comes to, he props himself up and his hand accidentally touches Gerald’s, who seizes it. A strong male clasp. Gerald asks if this was the Bruderschaft Birkin wanted. It’s certainly something.

They get dressed (Gerald nips upstairs to dress in a luxury dressing gown) before settling in front of the fire to eat the sandwiches the butler brought. Birkin tells him he came hotfoot from proposing to Ursula. He loves her. Which triggers them to discuss the nature of love and for Gerald to worry that he might never find it.

Chapter 21. Threshold

Gudrun goes to London to attend a show of her artwork. On her return Winifred has a bouquet for her. Gudrun goes to sit with the dying old man. He arranges for a stable to be converted into a studio for Winifred and Gudrun to work in.

Birkin arrives driving his car to collect Winifred, Gudrun and Gerald. The two latter sit in the back and ripely satirise Birkin’s ideas about an association of man and woman which leaves them separate and distinct, as stars. Gudrun and Gerald agree they want passionate love between committed partners. (Gudrun gives her opinion of marriage being a purely social form – ‘Marriage is a social arrangement, I take it, and has nothing to do with the question of love’ – which I imagine was shocking in the late 1910s.)

Chapter 22. Woman to Woman

Only at this point do we learn Birkin was driving Gerald to the railway station, then taking the other two on to his place for tea before disappearing off somewhere. Hermione turns up and she and Ursula have a long dissection of Birkin’s character, Hermione strongly advising Ursula not to marry him.

Like the rabbit in his chapter, the star of this one is Rupert’s cat which Hermione feeds cream and speaks to in Italian. Hermione is of that class of gentlewoman who know Italy, and Florence in particular, so exquisitely well. Her dear mama died in Florence. (Cf A Room with a View.)

Chapter 23. Excurse

Next day is a half holiday at the school so Birkin calls by in his car and takes Ursula for a spin. He hands her a tissue which turns out to be full of rings he’s giving her. But this has the unintended consequence of making her feel like she’s being bought, making her very angry and she launches into pages and pages criticising him, calling him a perverse death-eater (p.346) before getting him to stop the car, throwing the rings at him, getting out and walking off. He stoops to pick the rings out of the mud and acknowledges some of her criticisms are true.

Then she comes back. She asks for the rings again. Everything which made the fight, disappears and now they are both soppily in love and do lots of kissing. Get back in the car and drive to Southwell, home of Southwell Minster and have a grand high tea at The Saracens Head. Here, in a scene which would be easy to over-interpret, she kneels on the hearth

And she was drawn to him strangely, as in a spell. Kneeling on the hearth-rug before him, she put her arms round his loins, and put her face against his thigh. Riches! Riches! She was overwhelmed with a sense of a heavenful of riches.
‘We love each other,’ she said in delight.
‘More than that,’ he answered, looking down at her with his glimmering, easy face.
Unconsciously, with her sensitive fingertips, she was tracing the back of his thighs, following some mysterious life-flow there. She had discovered something, something more than wonderful, more wonderful than life itself. It was the strange mystery of his life-motion, there, at the back of the thighs, down the flanks. It was a strange reality of his being, the very stuff of being, there in the straight downflow of the thighs. It was here she discovered him one of the sons of God such as were in the beginning of the world, not a man, something other, something more.

There’s more than a page of her kneeling and tracing the outline of his loins and feeling his primal power. Very easy to give a sexual interpretation to. Utterly entranced, he decides they must both quit their jobs and travel. In a mad enthusiasm they both write letters to their bosses quitting with immediate notice. Birkin posts hers first so they don’t arrive at the same time. I smell trouble.

Then back into the car and touring the lanes absolutely transformed by total love. He feels like an Egyptian Pharaoh. They end up driving through Sherwood Forest, then stop at a circle of grass near a stream. It is darkest night. He throws down a rug, they strip off and make love, the first sex in the book, described in high mystical magical terms.

She had her desire of him, she touched, she received the maximum of unspeakable communication in touch, dark, subtle, positively silent, a magnificent gift and give again, a perfect acceptance and yielding, a mystery, the reality of that which can never be known, vital, sensual reality that can never be transmuted into mind content, but remains outside, living body of darkness and silence and subtlety, the mystic body of reality. She had her desire fulfilled. He had his desire fulfilled. For she was to him what he was to her, the immemorial magnificence of mystic, palpable, real otherness. (p.361)

Chapter 24. Death and Love

Old Thomas Crich is a long time a-dying. And the impact on his son, Gerald? Characteristically Lawrentian hyperbole.

Day by day he felt more and more like a bubble filled with darkness, round which whirled the iridescence of his consciousness, and upon which the pressure of the outer world, the outer life, roared vastly.

He takes to hanging round the studio watching Gudrun. One day he asks her to stay on into the evening for dinner. As he explains how he is suffering, the void his father’s illness makes him feel, she feels powerfully attracted. A strong soldierly type obviously suffering brings out the mothering instinct.

Interlude when Gerald’s cold mother comes down, tells him not to take it all on himself, then departs. Gerald insists on walking Gudrun down the drive to the gates. He puts his arms round her and draws her near and she melts. Under the railway bridge, where the colliers snog their sweethearts, they kiss:

So she relaxed, and seemed to melt, to flow into him, as if she were some infinitely warm and precious suffusion filling into his veins, like an intoxicant. Her arms were round his neck, he kissed her and held her perfectly suspended, she was all slack and flowing into him, and he was the firm, strong cup that receives the wine of her life…

But then she checks herself, as all women do; you don’t want to be thought ‘too easy of winning’.

How much more of him was there to know? Ah much, much, many days harvesting for her large, yet perfectly subtle and intelligent hands upon the field of his living, radio-active body. Ah, her hands were eager, greedy for knowledge. But for the present it was enough, enough, as much as her soul could bear. (p.375)

Gudrun doesn’t come next day because she has a cold. The day after, Gerald is sitting by his father’s bed when the old man gasps and arches and coughs up a gout of blood and dies. The mother makes a weird speech, telling her children none of them must look so beautiful and young on their deathbeds. Next day Gudrun goes to Winifred and the studio where Gerald pays a meek visit and shares their coffee.

The funeral is barely described. Instead the three horrible days when Gerald feels like a prisoner chained over an abyss of darkness. On the third evening he can’t bear it any more and goes for a vast walk in the darkness, which eventually brings him to the graveyard where his father’s grave is, and then he conceives a mad notion of seeing Gudrun. She is the only one who can save him.

So he asks directions from a drunk miner emerging from the town pub at chucking-out time (10pm) and makes his way to the Brangwen house. In a coincidence he arrives just as Birkin and Ursula step out, and hides from them in the shadows. Then he sneaks into the house – father William is asleep in the living room, his wife is in their bedroom – sneaks on tiptoe upstairs. There’s a comic digression when he figures he has the right room, sneaks over to the bedroom only to find the sleeping form of a boy, one of the brothers and has to tiptoe back out onto the landing.

Long story short, he finds Gudrun’s bedroom, wakes her. At first terrified, she locks her door, makes him take off his wet things and lets him have sex with her. He falls deeply asleep, as men do, while she lays for hours in the dark wondering what has just happened, what it means, remembering all her life up to this point.

She waits till the church bell rings 5 o’clock, then wakes him and urges him to go. In fact she has a nausea of him, needs him to be gone.

Chapter 25. Marriage or Not

Birkin has taken out a marriage licence but Ursula keeps delaying. She is in the third week of notice to the school. Christmas is coming. Gerald jokes that maybe he and Gudrun should hurry up so they can make it a joint wedding. Birkin isn’t sure marriage will suit Gerald.

Gerald and Birkin compare theories of marriage. For Birkin it is a social convention which denotes the partnership of free and equal lovers. Gerald has a more fatal view.

Marriage was not the committing of himself into a relationship with Gudrun. It was a committing of himself in acceptance of the established world, he would accept the established order, in which he did not livingly believe, and then he would retreat to the underworld for his life. (p.398)

Chapter 26. A Chair

Birkin and Ursula go to the flea market. They buy a beautiful old wooden chair but then argue about whether the present is accursed (Birkin) or the past was just as crudely materialistic (Ursula). This triggers Birkin into expressing Lawrence’s dogma of never having a home, of permanent travel.

‘The truth is, we don’t want things at all,’ he replied. ‘The thought of a house and furniture of my own is hateful to me.’
This startled her for a moment. Then she replied:
‘So it is to me. But one must live somewhere.’
‘Not somewhere – anywhere,’ he said. “One should just live anywhere – not have a definite place. I don’t want a definite place. As soon as you get a room, and it is complete, you want to run from it. Now my rooms at the Mill are quite complete, I want them at the bottom of the sea. It is a horrible tyranny of a fixed milieu, where each piece of furniture is a commandment-stone… You must leave your surroundings sketchy, unfinished, so that you are never contained, never confined, never dominated from the outside.’

Ursula had earlier noticed a working class couple, the woman heavily pregnant, sifting through the junk on display. On an impulse she decides to give them the chair they’ve just bought. Lawrence dwells on the pair’s working class appearance, the woman short and stocky, the man thin like a rat. The repeated word is ‘slinking’. In fact this is the longest description of working class people in the book. Gerald takes direction from a drunk miner. Working class women mock Ursula and Gudrun on their way to the wedding. There are the servants, of course. This is the longest description of proles and the key words are ‘slinking’ and ‘rat’.

Our couple find the whole place grim and miserable and low and wretched, ‘cold, somehow small, crowded, and like the end of the world.’ They catch a tram and agree that they need to get away, to wander the world.

‘And we will wander about on the face of the earth,” he said, “and we’ll look at the world beyond just this bit.’ (p.408)

Chapter 27. Flitting

At dinner, Ursula tells her family she’s getting married tomorrow. Her father is furious at not being told, not being given any notice. She says it’s her life, he says she owes her family and her parents the information. She defies him, makes him furious and he smacks her. She leaves the room, goes upstairs, packs her bags, comes downstairs, says goodbye, marches out of the house, down to the station, catches a train to where Birkin is staying, walks past his landlady into his room. (Birkin appears to be living in rented rooms as well as sometimes at the Mill which Hermione so wanted to decorate for him, thus retaining her hold over him.)

Rupert is non-plussed but reckons something like this was inevitable, embraces her and tells her he loves her. That is the reassurance she needs, but she can’t really see how deeply she is rescuing him from the fallen world, from his own doubts and incompleteness. They marry the next day (p.417). The wedding ceremony is not described in the slightest because it doesn’t matter to Rupert, Gudrun or Lawrence.

A few days at the Mill, while Rupert is away, Gerald and Ursula discuss marriage. He says she looks well on it. He asks her whether he should propose to Gudrun. They both have their doubts. Later when Rupert comes home, they agree that Gudrun is more the mistress type than the wife type, and Gerald a born lover rather than faithful husband. But Gerald floats the idea that they should all go away somewhere, somewhere abroad, as a foursome, which Ursula loves.

The Brangwen family have moved out of the house in Beldover. Will Brangwen needed to move to Nottingham for his work. They leave Ursula’s belongings behind for her to collect. She and Ursula walk over one afternoon. They’re both appalled by how bleak the empty house is. Birkin shows up with his car and shares the general horror at the bleak empty rooms.

Birkin drives Ursula back to the Mill with him, dropping Gudrun at the cottage she’s now renting in Willey Green. She watches them go, haunted by their happiness. Next day she goes to the Mill and finds Ursula alone, asks if she doesn’t think Gerald’s suggestion they all go away together is a cheek. Gudrun thinks the menfolk are treating her like a chattel, like a type (French for ‘trollop’).

Chapter 28. Gudrun in the Pompadour

The trip abroad begins. Gudrun and Gerald, being ready first, set off via London and Paris to Innsbruck, where they would meet Ursula and Birkin. In London they stayed one night. They went to the music-hall, and afterwards to the Pompadour Café. Gudrun hates this place because all the tight little groups of artists and bohemians hang out here.

Minette is there, the girl from chapter 6 who was pregnant and slept with Gerald in order to get back her target, Halliday. She comes over from a group of the gang and asks him to join them but he suavely refuses. She says just enough to indicate to Gudrun that she’s one of his mistresses.

The bohemian set (Halliday, Maxim, Julian and Minette) start slagging off Birkin, then Halliday finds a letter to him written by Rupert, full of his ripest pontificating, and reads it out loud to general ridicule. Gudrun is worked into a frenzy by their mockery, gets up, walks over to their table, politely asks if she may read the letter, takes it, turns and walks out of the cafe. The others can’t believe what is happening then start to boo. This makes her walk all the slower and more superior. Outside she hails a cab as Gerald catches up with her, thinking her magnificent. Gudrun thinks they are ‘dogs’ and calls Rupert a fool ‘to give himself away to such canaille.’

(According to Anthony Burgess’s biography of Lawrence, this scene is closely based on fact. The setting was the Café Royal where Lawrence’s enemy Philip Heseltine, started reading out Lawrence’s poems from the volume Amore in a mocking voice, and so infuriated Katherine Mansfield that she snatched the book out of his hands and stormed out, followed by her embarrassed husband, John Middleton Murray, Burgess page 97.)

Chapter 29. Continental

By far the longest chapter, 60 pages long, almost a novella.

Description of Birkin and Ursula’s voyage across the Channel, curled up in the prow of the ship in the absolute darkness. They disembark in Ostend by night. In a dream they take their bags through customs to the railway station, grab a sandwich and horrible coffee (nothing changes) then onto the train which travels through Bruges, Ghent, Brussels, through Luxembourg, through Alsace-Lorraine, through Metz, arriving at Basle. Overnight in a hotel, then another train to Zürich and then their final destination, Innsbruck.

They catch an open sleigh to the hotel where they see Gudrun. Ursula and Gudrun go to her hotel room to gossip, talking about mutual friends in Paris. Then everyone dresses and comes down for dinner where they agree how wonderful it is to be out of England, a country with the damper permanently on.

Next morning they take a small train to Hohenhausen, up in the snow, and then take sledges higher, higher into the snowy mountains, arriving at another, more remote hotel. In the hotel room, Gudrun is overcome, looking out the window at the snowy landscape and mountains she cries and Gerald embraces her.

They go down for coffee and cake, delicious. There are ten other guests, all German. They are introduced to the group who are listening to an odd man-child give a performance of the Cologne accent. When he’s finished Ursula is invited to sing the song, Annie Lowrie, with Gudrun accompanying her on the piano.

After dinner Ursula wants to go out into the darkness. She is intoxicated by the wonderful cold and the primal scenery. When they return to the hotel lounge, the Reunionsaal, they discover the other guests dancing the Schuhplatteln, the Tyrolese dance of the clapping hands and tossing the partner in the air at the crisis, with jumping and clapping, to the music of three zithers.

To no-one’s surprise, Gerald quickly learns the steps and becomes a demon. He dances with the Professor’s youngest daughter who is incandescent with awe at this Real Man holding and twirling her. Gudrun is lusted after by one of the young men who is to shy to ask to dance with her. Twas ever thus.

In their bedroom, Gudrun has a panic attack about Gerald, is completely alienated from him. Luckily he doesn’t notice. She mocks his dancing with the young girl, he doesn’t understand her. They sleep separately and she wakes superior to him. Looking at him asleep, she realises he can solve any practical problem, all challenges fall before his will. She imagines marrying him, supporting him as he becomes a Conservative MP, goes into politics, becomes Prime Minister.

But then she mocks her own girlish dreams. Who cares about politics? It’s all so old. And somehow, through this interior monologue, she becomes convinced to marry him. She wakes him with kisses, telling him he’s convinced her and he doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

The first days passed in an ecstasy of physical motion, sleighing, skiing, skating, moving in an intensity of speed and white light that surpassed life itself, and carried the souls of the human beings beyond into an inhuman abstraction of velocity and weight and eternal, frozen snow. (p.473)

Loerke

One day they’re snowed in. Gudrun and Ursula get to know Loerke, the puny little sculptor, who tells them his backstory, a broken home and deprived background, hitching to Italy, learning to sculpt the hard way. Now he is a professional with well-paid commissions and is working on a frieze in granite for a new factory in Germany. He gives an impassioned defence of art beautifying new industrial buildings that has a Bauhaus ring. Anyway, it puts Gudrun’s funny little clay models in the shade.

Lawrence’s antisemitism

Gerald and Rupert both dislike Loerke and the girls’ interest in him. Birkin, as always the most virulent and malicious, gives an extended slagging of Loerke which ends up with an unexpected, unnecessary and dismaying antisemitism. I could leave it at that but I’ll quote the entire passage so you can see for yourself the vehemence of Lawrence’s dislike and racism.

‘What do the women find so impressive in that little brat?’ Gerald asked.
‘God alone knows,’ replied Birkin, ‘unless it’s some sort of appeal he makes to them, which flatters them and has such a power over them.’
Gerald looked up in surprise.
‘Does he make an appeal to them?’ he asked.
‘Oh yes,’ replied Birkin. ‘He is the perfectly subjected being, existing almost like a criminal. And the women rush towards that, like a current of air towards a vacuum.’
‘Funny they should rush to that,’ said Gerald.
‘Makes one mad, too,’ said Birkin. ‘But he has the fascination of pity and repulsion for them, a little obscene monster of the darkness that he is.’
Gerald stood still, suspended in thought.
‘What do women want, at the bottom?’ he asked.
Birkin shrugged his shoulders.
‘God knows,’ he said. ‘Some satisfaction in basic repulsion, it seems to me. They seem to creep down some ghastly tunnel of darkness, and will never be satisfied till they’ve come to the end.’
Gerald looked out into the mist of fine snow that was blowing by. Everywhere was blind today, horribly blind.
‘And what is the end?’ he asked.
Birkin shook his head.
‘I’ve not got there yet, so I don’t know. Ask Loerke, he’s pretty near. He is a good many stages further than either you or I can go.’
‘Yes, but stages further in what?’ cried Gerald, irritated.
Birkin sighed, and gathered his brows into a knot of anger.
‘Stages further in social hatred,’ he said. ‘He lives like a rat, in the river of corruption, just where it falls over into the bottomless pit. He’s further on than we are. He hates the ideal more acutely. He hates the ideal utterly, yet it still dominates him. I expect he is a Jew—or part Jewish.’
‘Probably,’ said Gerald.
‘He is a gnawing little negation, gnawing at the roots of life.’
‘But why does anybody care about him?’ cried Gerald.
‘Because they hate the ideal also, in their souls. They want to explore the sewers, and he’s the wizard rat that swims ahead.’ (p.481)

Not a good look, as the Yanks say.

So Loerke is also a sculptor. As she looks at his pieces and hears his stories, Gudrun is beguiled. Loerke shows them a photo of a sculpture of a young girl sitting on a horse. Ursula says the horse is oddly distorted which triggers a little harangue.

‘It is a work of art, it is a picture of nothing, of absolutely nothing. It has nothing to do with anything but itself, it has no relation with the everyday world of this and other, there is no connection between them, absolutely none, they are two different and distinct planes of existence, and to translate one into the other is worse than foolish, it is a darkening of all counsel, a making confusion everywhere. Do you see, you must not confuse the relative work of action, with the absolute world of art. That you must not do.’ (p.484)

They all have different reactions. Gudrun agrees on the difference between the artist and the work, but Ursula insists the horse and the girl are reflections of the artist’s horrible personality. Gerald strolls up, takes a look at the photo and, characteristically, says he likes the look of the girl, Gudrun saying ‘wouldn’t he just’. But in a further development, when Loerke tells them the girl was an art student Gudrun immediately leaps to the conclusion that she was a naive and innocent young girl from a good family exploited and used by her wicked male teacher. #metoo. The sisterhood. As outraged by masculine abuse in 1920 as 2020.

But there’s more. Loerke freely admits he had to regularly smack and hit the girl before she’d sit still in this pose. And then, to make himself even more despicable, says that he only likes his models young:

‘I don’t like them any bigger, any older. Then they are beautiful, at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen – after that, they are no use to me.’

Furious, Ursula goes out into the snowy night and suddenly realises she hates it. Five pages back, they were all snow gods and snow artists, now, with Lawrentian abruptness, she’s shifted to the other extreme. She wants to go south to warmth and olive groves. She goes back into the hotel and finds Birkin in their room, reading and tells him. He laughingly agrees.

Next day they tell the other couple and can tell Gerald and Gudrun are relieved to hear of their departure. The men have been riling each other a bit. The two genders have last meetings. When Ursula explains that she and Birkin want to continue moving on, into new freedoms, Gudrun irritates her by saying that wherever you go you’ll always be with the same person, ‘only to secure oneself in one’s illusions.’

The men chat and Birkin asks Gerald when he’ll leave and Gerald replies maybe never. Maybe he’ll never go back to England. The sledge arrives, picks up Birkin and Ursula and off they go, leaving Gerald and Gudrun dwindling in the snow, waving.

Chapter 30. Snowed Up

The second longest chapter at 38 pages. Taken together, the two ‘abroad’ chapters make about 100 pages.

Left to themselves, Gudrun and Gerald fall into a fierce and bitter war for supremacy. They rage and argue. She moves into a separate bedroom. They fight all the time. She begs him to tell her he loves her. He feels like he has been ripped open. He has fantasies of murdering her. They both go mad.

While Gerald’s off skiing, Gudrun become friendlier with Loerke over their shared aesthetic, particularly the basic principle that the artist and the art exist in different realms.

The suggestion of primitive art was their refuge, and the inner mysteries of sensation their object of worship. Art and Life were to them the Reality and the Unreality.

One time Gerald is bullying Loerke in argument like an arrogant Englishman and when Loerke turns to her for appeal, she angrily tells him to stop calling her Mrs Crich. She is not Mrs Crich. She is not married. A light goes on in Loerke’s eye and Gerald is mortified.

Perversely he is so self contained about this insult that she loves him and goes to his bedroom that night to have sex, gladly. ‘And she had extreme pleasure of him.’ But she withholds her soul. Any couple eventually reach the end of fleshly pleasure and everything is just repetition. Gudrun unconsciously knows that the next step, for her, is alliance with Loerke. Loerke is very patient and encourages long conversations about Mozart and Goethe et al, to win her over.

She and Gerald have a massive argument when Gerald asks her what on earth she sees in Loerke and she bluntly tells him the little German understands women and is not a fool. Stunned, Gerald asks if that is the end of their relationship. She says either of them are free to leave at any time. For some reason the bluntness of all this arouses Gerald, she sees it, is disgusted, and walks out.

And so on. After a long campaign Loerke subtly suggests that she might go with him to his studio in Dresden. Not to be his mistress. But because he admires her company and her intelligence. She is flattered though a little chagrined that he doesn’t flatter her beauty.

Gerald is out all day skiing, feeling king of the mountains up in the high slopes. He doesn’t want to come back to the hotel and people. As soon as he sees Gudrun he fantasises about murdering her, the sheer pleasure of strangling the life out of her. They dine and later, in his room, she says the experiment is over. They gave it a try and it failed. Why, he asks. Because you cannot love, and I could never love you.

At this Gerald feels the pure desire to kill go down his arms and into his hands and turns towards he but, sensing his rage, she nips out the room, across to hers and locks the door. Cue pages of her pondering her whole life and above all the patheticness of men, of Gerald, Birkin, all of them, of the mining business with all its managers. Babies, all of them. And the sheer tedium of doing the same thing day after day. Gerald stays up all night reading, mortally afraid of lying sleepless in the dark.

Next morning over breakfast she announces she’ll be leaving the following day. Gerald says he’ll make the necessary arrangements then goes out for a day’s skiing. Gudrun feels wonderfully empowered. The long vigil and pondering her life situation has clarified everything. She lets Loerke take her out tobogganing even though he looks like a ridiculous pixie. He doesn’t take the tobogganing very seriously which she finds an immense relief from Gerald’s intense seriousness about all activities. Lightness and irony are what she needs.

At the end of the day he crashes them in the snow, laughing, then produces a coffee thermos, some Schnapps and biscuits. They are merrily discussing where Gudrun will go the next day – she doesn’t know and doesn’t care – when Gerald looms whitely up out of the snow.

Crack! Gerald punches Loerke aside, then punches him again. Gudrun brings her fist down on his face and chest which prompts him to turn and, finally, fulfil his deepest wish, to strangle her to death. His hands grip her throat and strangle the life out of her as she thrashes and then starts to go limp which is the moment when Loerke comes to himself and makes one of his sarcastic remarks, in French: ‘Monsieur! Quand vous aurez fini –’ ‘Sir, when you have quite finished…’ and the mockery of it brings Gerald back to his senses.

Not in horror, but futility. What is he doing? Who cares if this silly woman lives or dies? Oh what’s the point? And he drops Gudrun, looks round in a daze, then stumbles off into the snow. He has had enough. He wants to sleep. He wants it to end. He climbs higher and higher into the land of sheer cliffs and rockslides. He slips in a snowslide but that doesn’t wake his daze. Onwards and upwards. He comes across a crucifix almost buried in the snow and is overcome with terror that he is going to be murdered, looking all round him in his fear, raising his arm to ward off the blow. And thus walking he slips over the edge of a deep bowl,

surrounded by sheer slopes and precipices, out of which rose a track that brought one to the top of the mountain. But he wandered unconsciously, till he slipped and fell down, and as he fell something broke in his soul, and immediately he went to sleep. (p.533)

Chapter 31. Exeunt

Gerald died. They bring the body back to the hotel. Next morning they bring the body back to the hotel. A woman comes to tell Gudrun. She is amazed by how cold and unaffected she is. Like Mersault and his mother. She finds Loerke in the main room but he is not pleased to see her. She telegrams to Birkin and Ursula who arrive the next day but she is cold with them. In fact after five minutes the sisters have nothing to say to each other.

The final pages focus on Birkin. He makes all the practical arrangements and deals with the authorities. He visits the frozen corpse then treks up the hill to the snowy bowl where Gerald dies, then comes back to the hotel and confronts the corpse again. This time he breaks down in hysterical tears, and Ursula sees him. Birkin is distraught that Gerald didn’t love him. He says he offered him his love but he didn’t take it. He remembers their hands clutching each other as they came round from the famous wrestling scene. If only that moment had lasted, if only Gerald had loved him, maybe he would still be alive.

Birkin and Ursula and one of Gerald’s brothers accompany the body back to England where the family insists he be buried. Ursula and Birkin remove to the Mill and live very quietly. (Gudrun has gone to Dresden and ‘writes no particulars of herself.’)

On the last pages of this vast book, Ursula and Birkin argue. She says, Aren’t I enough for you and he says, No. You are all women to me but I wanted something more, I wanted a male kind of love, I wanted one true friend, and I had him but he rejected me. Ursula says she doesn’t believe Birkin’s notion of an eternal love between men, ‘It’s an obstinacy, a theory, a perversity’ and he replies ‘I don’t believe that’ and that’s the end of the book.

A war novel?

Lawrence rewrote the novel to achieve its final form, between 1915 and 1917, the central years of the First World War. In his foreword to the American edition, he said he wanted to the timeline of the novel to be unfixed. But critics at the time and ever since have pointed out the tremendous bitterness observable in many of the characters – most extreme in Birkin’s visions of exterminating humanity altogether – radiate the bitterness and anger and disillusionment which Lawrence was hardly the only one to experience during these years. If Birkin repeatedly express this, it is Gerald who in a sense acts it out, overcome with psychopathy at the novel’s bitter end. And the carrying of the body of a young Englishman, killed abroad, back to his home in England was, of course, something experienced by hundreds of thousands of families.

Lawrence at one point considered titling the book Dies Irae, Days of Anger.

Flouting conventional morality

‘The old ideals are dead as nails – nothing there. It seems to me there remains only this perfect union with a woman – sort of ultimate marriage – and there isn’t anything else.’
‘And you mean if there isn’t the woman, there’s nothing?’ said Gerald.
‘Pretty well that – seeing there’s no God.’ (Chapter 5, on the train to London)

Just to note the obvious:

1. None of the characters seem to believe in God, Christian teaching or Christian morality. The girls’ father, William, tells Birkin he expects it of his daughters, but nobody else even mentions it.

2. None of the quartet are bothered by pre-marital sex in the slightest. There’s nothing about sin, hell and damnation, nothing at all. It’s assessed solely on whether it is right for the individual and their relationship i.e. the ‘modern’ view.

3. Even marriage, which they all enter into, none of them really care about much. It’s a purely social convention which cements what has already been agreed between free individuals.

GUDRUN: ‘Marriage is a social arrangement, I take it, and has nothing to do with the question of love.’ (Chapter 21)

BIRKIN: ‘I’m not interested in legal marriage, one way or another. It’s a mere question of convenience.’ (p.396)

In fact Birkin has a violent objection to traditional ideas of marriage.

‘Marriage in the old sense seems to me repulsive. Égoïsme à deux is nothing to it. It’s a sort of tacit hunting in couples: the world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests, and stewing in its own little privacy—it’s the most repulsive thing on earth.’ (p.397)

In fact, you can easily misread him to be attacking the institution of marriage which, of course, for conservatives then and now, was sacred:

‘You’ve got to take down the love-and-marriage ideal from its pedestal. We want something broader. I believe in the additional perfect relationship between man and man – additional to marriage.’
‘I can never see how they can be the same,’ said Gerald.
‘Not the same – but equally important, equally creative, equally sacred, if you like.’ (p.397)

4. And experimentation. Why not go whole hog? Here’s Gudrun fired up by the wild dancing in the Reunionsaal at the Tyrolese inn:

They might do as they liked – this she realised as she went to sleep. How could anything that gave one satisfaction be excluded? What was degrading? Who cared? Degrading things were real, with a different reality. And he [Birkin] was so unabashed and unrestrained. Wasn’t it rather horrible, a man who could be so soulful and spiritual, now to be so – she balked at her own thoughts and memories: then she added – so bestial? So bestial, they two! – so degraded! She winced. But after all, why not? She exulted as well. Why not be bestial, and go the whole round of experience? She exulted in it. She was bestial. How good it was to be really shameful! There would be no shameful thing she had not experienced. Yet she was unabashed, she was herself. Why not? She was free when she knew everything, and no dark shameful things were denied her. (p.464)

You can see how old-fashioned moralists and social guardians would be outraged. For all these reasons Lawrence couldn’t find a publisher for the book in the UK and when it was, finally, published in the US, in 1920, it was to subscribers only. Such was the threat and illegality of what to us now appear completely harmless, indeed anodyne, opinions.

Summary of people and places

Ursula Brangwen

26, class teacher at Willey Green Grammar School. Always a bit flustered, always rushing in too soon. Greenish eyes. Pairs with Rupert Birkin. Favourite phrase: why not? which drives her father mad.

Gudrun Brangwen

25, artist and model. Dark hair. In London at art school she got to know the extended networks of Bohemia. The more conventionally beautiful of the two. Calm and confident on top, profoundly restless underneath. Ursula’s nickname for her is ‘Prune’. Pairs with Gerald Crich.

Rupert Birkin

‘Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself.’ (p.230)

School inspector. Tall, thin, tired misanthrope. Wishes all humanity could be exterminated. Prophet of individualism (someone should write a book comparing Wilde and Lawrence as proponents of unflinching absolute individualism.) An inveterate lecturer and preacher:

‘He isn’t sympathetic, he wants to dictate.’ (p.367)

Here’s Maxim slagging him off in chapter 27:

‘He is a megalomaniac, of course, it is a form of religious mania. He thinks he is the Saviour of man.’ (p.433)

An emotional chameleon, ‘he is so changeable and unsure of himself’ or, as Ursula puts it late on:

‘He says he wants me to accept him non-emotionally, and finally – I really don’t know what he means. He says he wants the demon part of himself to be mated – physically – not the human being. You see he says one thing one day, and another the next – and he always contradicts himself – ‘
‘And always thinks about himself, and his own dissatisfaction,’ said Hermione slowly. (p.330)

Rupert is generally agreed to be a self portrait by Lawrence in which case he was painfully aware of his own shortcomings. Here’s Hermione dissecting him:

‘He is so uncertain, so unstable — he wearies, and then reacts. I couldn’t tell you what his reactions are. I couldn’t tell you the agony of them. That which he affirms and loves one day — a little latter he turns on it in a fury of destruction. He is never constant, always this awful, dreadful reaction. Always the quick change from good to bad, bad to good.’ (p.332)

At the start of the novel Birkin is going out with Hermione, under her thumb. Takes a long time to shake her off. The growing attraction between him and Ursula entails prolonged rivalry between Ursula and Hermione. After much arguing they finally surrender to each other and, on page 360, have sex in Sherwood Forest.

Gerald always feels a bit superior and protective towards him, thinks him ‘amazingly clever, but incurably innocent’. They stay in the London Soho flat together. They wrestle naked together (chapter 20).

Gerald Crich

31, coalmine owner, superb physical specimen, fair hair and moustache, blue eyes. His ‘gleaming blondness.’ Imperious, ‘very good-looking and self-contained.’ Former officer in the Army till he resigned his commission. Explored the Amazon so occasionally tells stories about the Indians. Compelled to become head of the family coalmining business as his father falls ill, Gerald clings onto his boyhood dreams of being Odysseus. In his imagination:

The world was really a wilderness where one hunted and swam and rode. He rebelled against all authority. Life was a condition of savage freedom.

Tries to quell the mare he’s riding as the colliery train goes by, to Ursula and Gudrun’s horror. Wrestles naked with Rupert in front of the library fire (chapter 20).

Hermione Roddice

A friend of the Criches, ‘a tall, slow, reluctant woman with a weight of fair hair and a pale, long face.’ Upper class and used to dismissing people when she’s lost interest. Flat bosom. Long, grave, downward-looking face. Heavy, drugged, shadowy eyelids. Grey eyes. Her musing sing-song voice. Needs to dominate men: ‘It was always the same, this joy in power she manifested, peculiarly in power over any male being.’ (p.337)

The book starts with her going out with her partnered with Birkin, who is restless to escape her domination but it takes half the book for him to become free enough to commit to Ursula.

Beldover

The small colliery town in the Midlands where the Brangwen family live. Gudrun, fresh back from living in London, is repelled by its ‘amorphous ugliness’, the high street ‘part shops, part dwelling-houses, utterly formless and sordid,’, ‘the whole sordid gamut of pettiness, the long amorphous, gritty street’, ‘this shapeless, barren ugliness’, ‘the insufferable torture of these ugly, meaningless people, this defaced countryside’. In chapter 9 Lawrence gives a vivid depiction:

This was the world of powerful, underworld men who spent most of their time in the darkness. In their voices she could hear the voluptuous resonance of darkness, the strong, dangerous underworld, mindless, inhuman. They sounded also like strange machines, heavy, oiled. The voluptuousness was like that of machinery, cold and iron.

And the party atmosphere on Friday nights:

It was dark, the market-place was hot with kerosene flares, which threw a ruddy light on the grave faces of the purchasing wives, and on the pale abstract faces of the men. The air was full of the sound of criers and of people talking, thick streams of people moved on the pavements towards the solid crowd of the market. The shops were blazing and packed with women, in the streets were men, mostly men, miners of all ages. Money was spent with almost lavish freedom.

Gudrun perceives Gerald as ‘her escape from the heavy slough of the pale, underworld, automatic colliers.’

Shortlands

Home of the Crich family. ‘It was a long, low old house, a sort of manor farm, that spread along the top of a slope just beyond the narrow little lake of Willey Water. Shortlands looked across a sloping meadow that might be a park, because of the large, solitary trees that stood here and there, across the water of the narrow lake, at the wooded hill that successfully hid the colliery valley beyond, but did not quite hide the rising smoke. Nevertheless, the scene was rural and picturesque, very peaceful…’

‘The panting and rattling of the coal mines could always be heard at Shortlands…’ (p.249) The drive is a mile long. ‘The dark drive that ran between close-cut hedges through sloping meadows’ (p.370).

Willey Water

‘The narrow little lake of Willey Water’, where Diana Crich and her lover drown at the annual water party (Chapter 14).

Based on real people

Publication of ‘Women in Love’ was delayed not only because publishers feared prosecution under the obscenity laws which ‘The Rainbow’ fell foul of, but also because of the threats of libel actions by people who thought they had been included and, generally, mocked in the novel.

1. In the version we read, the young woman Gerald sleeps with in Soho is named Minette. She was originally named ‘the Pussum’. This was because the Lawrence’s friend, Philip Heseltine (who appears as Halliday) had a mistress who was nicknamed the Puma’. Changing her name to Minette, and a payment of £50, staved off a libel case.

(Anthony Burgess’s entertaining biography of Lawrence tells us that Heseltine was very young when he came into Lawrence’s orbit. Under the name Peter Warlock he was to become a noted writer of classical songs. Coincidentally, he died in the same year as Lawrence, 1930.)

2. More important was Lady Ottoline Morrell who was furious that the rather pompous, opinionated and superior character of Hermione Roddice was based on her.

a woman of the new school, full of intellectuality, and heavy, nerve-worn with consciousness. She was passionately interested in reform, her soul was given up to the public cause. But she was a man’s woman, it was the manly world that held her.

Hermione’s country house, Breadalby, is Lady Ottoline’s Oxford house, Garsington Manor, transplanted to Derbyshire. Not only her aloofness and cloying clinging to Birkin, but the scene where she attacks him with a paperweight, intending to kill him… No wonder she threatened to sue.

3. One of her lunch parties features ‘a learned, dry Baronet of fifty, who was always making witticisms and laughing at them heartily in a harsh, horse-laugh’. This is Bertrand Russell.

4. The notion of a quartet of two couples might be based on the attempt by Lawrence and Frieda to live in a joint household in Cornwall with the writers, John Middleton Murray and Katherine Mansfield. Murray is nothing like Gerald but Mansfield does have some similarities with Gudrun, an artist expert at working in miniatures, her loyalty: and also the fact that she was unfaithful to Murray, having an affair with the artist Mark Gertler who was, apparently, partly the basis for Loerke, both being German-Jewish.

5. Thomas Crich, owner and patriarch of the coalmine, is clearly modelled on Thomas Barber of Barber Walker Company in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, whose mines Lawrence’s father, Arthur, worked in.

Reviews

Anthony Burgess tells us the novel was met with review headlines including ‘A Book The Police Should Ban’ and ‘Loathsome Study of Sex Depravity Leading Youth to Unspeakable Disaster’ (Burgess, page 101). The stupidity, imaginative incapacity, and the obsession with sex in the crudest, most literal sense remain signs of the philistine mind to this day.

The rationale of Lawrence’s travels

At several points Birkin reiterates Lawrence’s own view about ‘settling down’ in a ‘nice little home’, namely that it’s death of the soul.

‘One should avoid this home instinct. It’s not an instinct, it’s a habit of cowardliness. One should never have a home.’ (p.397)

So as soon as the war was over and he was able to leave wretched little England, Lawrence was off!

Credit

‘Women in Love’ by D.H. Lawrence was published in 1921 by Martin Secker. References are to the 1970 reprint of the 1960 Penguin Classics paperback edition.

Related links

• Women in Love online
• Women in Love article on Encyclopedia.com

Related reviews

• D.H. Lawrence reviews