David H Lawrence

Women in Love Illustrated David H Lawrence

Women in Love (1920) is a novel by British author D. H. Lawrence. It is a sequel to his earlier novel The Rainbow (1915), and follows the continuing loves and lives of the Brangwen sisters, Gudrun and Ursula. Gudrun Brangwen, an artist, pursues a destructive relationship with Gerald Crich, an industrialist. Lawrence contrasts this pair with the love that develops between Ursula Branden and Rupert Bikini, an alienated intellectual who articulates many opinions associated with the author. The emotional relationships thus established are given further depth and tension by an intense psychological and physical attraction between Gerald and Rupert. The novel ranges over the whole of British society before the time of the First World War and eventually concludes in the snows of the Tyrolean Alps. Ursula's character draws on Lawrence's wife Frieda and Gunrunner's on Katherine Mansfield, while Rupert Bikini's has elements of Lawrence himself, and Gerald Rich is partly based on Mansfield's husband, John Middleton Murray.