Women in Love

The Two Couples

Women in Love picks up the story of Ursula Brangwen from The Rainbow and introduces her sister Gudrun, a sculptor returned to their Midlands mining town after a period in London. The novel’s four central characters are: Ursula; Gudrun; Rupert Birkin, an schools inspector with violent ideas about love and modern civilization; and Gerald Crich, heir to the local coal mines and a man whose physical beauty conceals what Lawrence diagnoses as a fundamental orientation toward death.

The novel’s structure is deceptively simple: two love relationships running in parallel, commenting on each other by contrast. Ursula and Birkin argue, separate, reunite, and eventually arrive at something that is neither conventional marriage nor conventional bohemian freedom — a relationship structured around what Birkin calls “star equilibrium,” two separate centres of being in orbit around each other, each maintaining their independence. Gudrun and Gerald begin in physical passion and move, through Gudrun’s artistic ambition and Gerald’s possessive need, toward mutual destruction in the Swiss Alps.

Lawrence’s central character — the one whose ideas carry most of the novel’s philosophical weight — is Birkin. He is often accused of being a Lawrence mouthpiece, and the accusation has force; but Lawrence is shrewder about Birkin than readers sometimes notice. Birkin’s ideas are tested by the novel, not merely illustrated by it. Ursula resists him, often correctly. His friendship with Gerald — the male equivalent of the Birkin-Ursula relationship, and one of the most intense male friendships in English fiction — is a failure, and its failure is not presented as Birkin’s success but as a genuine loss.

Gerald and the Death Wish

The novel’s most fully realized character is Gerald Crich, and the portrait of Gerald is Lawrence’s most sustained engagement with what he saw as the central pathology of industrial civilization. Gerald has inherited mines from his father, a benevolent patriarch who ran them on quasi-religious principles. Gerald’s modernization — his introduction of pure efficiency, the organization of workers as mechanical components of a system rather than human beings in a relationship — is presented not as villainous but as the logical endpoint of a worldview: the will to dominate matter, to impose order, to eliminate the spontaneous and the living in favour of the controlled and the measurable.

This will, which is brilliant and productive in the mines, is lethal in intimate life. Gerald needs Gudrun the way he needs the mines to be efficient: as confirmation of his control. When Gudrun resists this — when her artistic consciousness refuses to be organized — the relationship enters a death spiral. The Alpine finale, in which Gerald walks alone into the snow and dies of exposure without quite willing his own death, is one of the most resonant endings in modernist fiction: a man who was all will meeting the one force that will not be organized.

The famous Birkin-Gerald wrestling scene — two men grappling naked in a firelit room, establishing some connection that neither can articulate — is Lawrence’s most explicit statement of what Gerald and Birkin might have been to each other, and what Gerald’s death costs. Birkin at the end has Ursula and the partial success of his star equilibrium; he has lost Gerald, and he knows that what he has with Ursula, however real, is incomplete without the other connection. Women in Love ends not in triumph but in ongoing negotiation with loss.

Our rating: 4.6/5 — Lawrence’s most philosophically serious novel and his most formally sophisticated — the second half of the greatest fictional account of modern English consciousness.