Women in Love

Abstract

In The Rainbow Lawrence probably went further than anybody had gone before in creating a sense of experiencing the nature of unconsciousness. In Women in Love he brings that experience more fully into relation with consciousness. Form and language become more complex as he endeavours to encompass ‘the whole man alive’ — mind and body, intellect and instincts, consciousness and unconsciousness. This investigation is paralleled in his non-fictional writings, where his changing and often contradictory views and attitudes are explicit. His letter of 1913 in which he writes of his ‘belief in the blood as being wiser than the intellect’¹ seems to me to have been given excessive weight in much Lawrence criticism. It is often treated as if it were the key to the whole of Lawrence’s work. If it were so, his novels would have the ‘fatal halfness’ he exposes in some of the characters in Women in Love.