Women in Love

Abstract

Women in Love is a sequel to The Rainbow, continuing the story of Ursula’s attempt to achieve a satisfactory love relationship, and bringing her sister, Gudrun, into new prominence. (Lawrence originally had it in mind to write one novel, not two, under the title The Sisters.) Women in Love is, however, a more artistically controlled novel than The Rainbow. Nowhere else does Lawrence achieve such an equable distribution of his creative powers. It can be praised on several grounds—for structural simplicity and toughness, for psychological penetration, for the ambitious presentation of men and women in relation to the forces of modern industrialism, and for its great scenes of untranslatable symbolic power. But it is the combining of all these in an organically related work of art that makes Women in Love such a remarkable achievement.