Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

There was a long pause, whilst Ursula stitched and Gudrun went on with her sketch. The sisters were women. Ursula twenty-six, and Gudrun twenty-five. But both had the remote, virgin look of modern girls, sisters of Artemis rather than of Hebe.

(page 6)

She craved for Rupert Birkin. When he was there, she felt complete, she was sufficient, whole. For the rest of time she was established on the sand, built over a chasm, and, in spite of all her vanity and securities, any common maid-servant of positive, robust temper could fling her down this bottomless pit of insufficiency, by the slightest movement of jeering or contempt. And all the while the pensive, tortured woman piled up her own defences of aesthetic knowledge, and culture, and world-visions, and disinterestedness. Yet she could never stop up the terrible gap of insufficiency.

(page 15)

“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.”

(pages 56-57)

Really, what a mistake he had made, thinking he wanted people, thinking he wanted a woman.

(page 106)

“Love isn’t a desideratum—it is an emotion you feel or you don’t feel, according to circumstance.”

(page 128)

His soul was arrested in wonder. She was enkindled in her own living fire. Arrested in wonder and in pure, perfect attraction, he moved towards her. She sat like a strange queen, almost supernatural in her glowing smiling richness.

(page 129)

Ursula was deeply and passionately in love with Birkin, and she was capable of nothing.

(page 189)

It was intolerable, this possession at the hands of woman. Always a man must be considered as the broken-off fragment of a woman, and the sex was the still aching scar of the laceration. Man must be added on to a woman, before he had any real place or wholeness.

(page 200)

She believed that love was
everything.
Man must render himself up to her. He must be quaffed to the dregs by her. Let him be
her man
utterly, and she in return would be his humble slave—whether she wanted it or not.

(page 265)

“
There
is
such a thing as two people being in love for the whole of their lives—perhaps. But marriage is neither here nor there, even then. If they are in love, well and good. If not—why break eggs about it!”

(page 290)

“One should avoid this
home
instinct. It’s not an instinct, it’s a habit of cowardliness. One should never have a
home.”

(page 354)

“Why
does
every woman think her aim in life is to have a hubby and a little grey home in the west?”

(page 377)

She lay and looked at him, as he slept. He was sheerly beautiful, he was a perfect instrument. To her mind, he was a pure, inhuman, almost superhuman instrument. His instrumentality appealed so strongly to her, she wished she were God, to use him as a tool.

(page 419)

“Aren’t I enough for you?”

(page 484)

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Women in Love
was first published in 1920.

Published in 2005 by Barnes & Noble Classics with new Introduction, Notes, Biography, Chronology, Inspired By, Comments & Questions, and For Further Reading.

Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading

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colophon are trademarks of Barnes & Noble, Inc.

Women in Love

ISBN-10: 1-59308-258-4 ISBN-13: 978-1-59308-258-1

eISBN : 978-1-411-43354-0

LC Control Number 2005920896

Produced and published in conjunction with:
Fine Creative Media, Inc.
322 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY 10001

Michael J. Fine, President and Publisher

Printed in the United States of America

3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

D. H. LAWRENCE

David Herbert Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885, in Eastwood, a coal-mining town in Nottinghamshire, England, the fourth child of a couple whose marriage Lawrence later described as “one carnal, bloody fight.” Lawrence’s psychologically intimate relationship with his mother would serve as the grounds for many of his novels. Lawrence studied to be a teacher but became interested in the arts. Jessie Chambers, a school love interest, submitted a number of Lawrence’s early poems to Ford Hermann Hueffer [Ford Madox Ford], editor of the
English Review,
and he published them. This first exposure would prove to be fruitful, and Lawrence soon published several novels, including
The White Peacock
(1911) and
The Trespasser
(1912), as well as
Love Poems and Others
(1913).

Lawrence gained fame and notoriety in 1913 with the publication of
Sons and Lovers,
a novel that was criticized by some as being too overtly sexual.
Sons and Lovers
was followed by
The Rainbow
(1915), a story of two sisters growing up in northern England that was banned upon its publication for its alleged obscenity.
Women in
Love, the sequel to The
Rainbow,
was published in 1920. His novel
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
(1928) was pronounced obscene and banned in the United Kingdom and America. Despite the censorship, Lawrence remained unapologetic for creating “art for my sake.” His personal life, including his elopement with Frieda von Richthofen Weekley, wife of one of his professors and the mother of three children, fueled the aura of scandal that followed him throughout his career.

Despite censorship and other setbacks, in his exceptionally prolific literary career Lawrence authored more than a dozen novels, three volumes of stories and three volumes of novellas, an immense collection of poetry, and numerous works of nonfiction. He also wrote eight plays, most of which have been forgotten. The Lawrences traveled widely, but as Lawrence’s health worsened they settled in the south of France, where the author died on March 2, 1930. His ashes lie in a memorial chapel at his ranch in New Mexico.

THE WORLD OF D. H. LAWRENCE
AND
WOMEN IN LOVE

1885	David Herbert Lawrence is born on September 11 in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, a working-class mining town in central England. The sickly Lawrence is confined to bed for much of his early childhood and grows close to his mother, who tends to him.
1898-1901	Lawrence attends Nottingham High School on a scholarship, then takes a job as a clerk in a surgical appliance factory. His brother, William Ernest, dies in October 1901. Lawrence suffers an attack of pneumonia and leaves his job.
1902-1906	Lawrence takes a part-time teaching job at the British Schools in Eastwood and attends a teacher-training center in Ilkeston.
1906	Lawrence enrolls at University College, Nottingham, to get his teacher’s certificate; he leaves after two years.
1909-1910	The English Review publishes several of Lawrence’s poems. His mother, Lydia, dies in December 1910; Lawrence assists her by administering an overdose of morphine.
1911	Lawrence’s first novel, The White Peacock, is published.
1912	Lawrence and Frieda von Richthofen, the wife of Lawrence’s former Nottingham professor Ernest Weekley and cousin of famous aviator Manfred von Richthofen (also known as the “Red Baron”), run away to Germany and Italy. Lawrence’s second novel, The Trespasser, is published.
1913	Rejected at first by Heinemann Publishers, the autobiographical Sons and Lovers is published. Criticized for his graphic depiction of sexual relations, Lawrence defends himself by stating that “whatever the blood feels, and believes, and says, is always true.”
1914	World War I breaks out. Lawrence and Frieda marry on July 13. Unable to obtain passports, for the duration of the war they are forced to live in various places in England, including Cornwall and Derbyshire, where they share a house with John Middleton Murry and the writer Katherine Mansfield.
1915	Upon the publication of The Rainbow, Lawrence is prosecuted for his graphic descriptions of sex, and the novel is suppressed. More than 1,000 copies of the book are burned.
1916	Lawrence is introduced to Lady Ottoline Morrell, the wife of a liberal member of Parliament, and she becomes one of his most important patrons. Through her, Lawrence forms acquaintanceships with Aldous Huxley, E. M. Forster, and Bertrand Russell. Lawrence writes Women in Love, the sequel to The Rainbow.
1917	Lawrence and Frieda are suspected of being spies for the Germans.
1919	The Lawrences journey throughout Europe, stopping in Sicily, Sardinia, and Switzerland.
1920	Lawrence publishes The Lost Girl and also publishes Women in Love in New York.
1921	Women in Love is published in London. Movements in European History, Lawrence’s first major nonfiction work, is published, as is his Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious.
1922	Aaron’s Rod, a novel that reflects the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche on Lawrence, is published. The Lawrences travel to Ceylon and Australia, where Aaron’s Rod is set. James Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land are published.
1923	Lawrence publishes his novel Kangaroo. He and Frieda visit Mexico as well as New York and Los Angeles. Studies in Classic American Literature —in which Lawrence considers Benjamin Franklin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and others—is published.
1924-1925	Mabel Dodge Luhan, a New York socialite, gives the Lawrences her Kiowa Ranch in Taos, New Mexico, in return for the original manuscript of Sons and Lovers. Lawrence’s father, Arthur, dies. While visiting Mexico City, Lawrence falls ill with tuberculosis and is forced to return to England.
1925-1926	The Lawrences settle near Florence. Frieda begins an affair with Angelino Ravagli, a former Italian infantry officer whom she will marry in 1950. Lawrence visits his hometown of Eastwood for the last time. The Plumed Serpent, a political novel about Mexico and a revival of its ancient Aztec religion, is published.
1928	Lady Chatterley’s Lover is published; it is banned in the United Kingdom and the United States, creating a great demand for the book.
1929	Lawrence’s Expressionist paintings, for which he gains posthumous renown, are declared obscene and confiscated from an exhibition at London’s Warren Gallery.
1930	Lawrence succumbs to tuberculosis on March 2 in Vence, France. Frieda moves to Kiowa Ranch, New Mexico, where she builds a small memorial chapel that houses Lawrence’s ashes.
1960	An unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is published after Penguin Books is acquitted of obscenity charges brought under the Obscene Publications Act. The trial lasts six days; the thirty-five expert witnesses called to testify include E. M. Forster.

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