Bradshaw David - Women in Love

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

WOMEN IN LOVE

DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE was born on n September 1885 at Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, the son of a coal miner. Through high intelligence, determination, and the support first of his mother and later of important literary mentors, he moved away from his origins, gaining a foothold both in the world of the lower middle-class and in the world of artistic London. In 1908 he became a schoolmaster in Croydon, and in 1911 his first novel, The White Peacock, was published. Appearing set for steady progress towards literary and professional respectability, Lawrence decisively halted this trajectory by eloping in 1912 with Frieda Weekley, the wife of one of his former professors, and by publishing three years later an obscene book. Sons and Lovers (1913) and a volume of short stories, The Prussian Officer (1914), had been well received, but The Rainbow was banned on publication in 1915. Lawrence had anticipated that this sexually candid and formally experimental novel would cause a stir, but he was unprepared for the campaign of vilification by certain reviewers. Lawrences sense of himself as an outlaw, and his frenzy at the militaristic fervour of the war years, intensified his hatred of most aspects of English life and sharpened the diagnostic probing of his next, and perhaps his greatest, novel, Women in Love (1920). After the end of the war Lawrence travelled restlesslyto Italy, Ceylon, Australia, America, Mexico, and back to France and Italyand despite steadily worsening health embodied his experience prolifically in diverse genres. But though the settings and plots of much of his later work are exotic, Lawrence was always essentially concerned with what he saw as the death-in-life lived by people in the so-called advanced world, and for his last, and most controversial, novel, Lady Chatterleys Lover (1928), he returned to the English scene and the coal-mining Midlands which imaginatively still possessed him. Lawrence died of tuberculosis on 2 March 1930.

DAVID BRADSHAW is Hawthornden Fellow in English Literature at Worcester College, Oxford, and a University Lecturer in English. He has edited The Hidden Huxley: Contempt and Compassion for the Masses, 19201936 (London: Faber and Faber, 1994) and has written articles on Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Huxley, Woolf, and Yeats. He has also edited Lawrences The White Peacock for Oxford Worlds Classics.

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

D. H. LAWRENCE

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
DAVID BRADSHAW

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Introduction, Note on the Text, Select Bibliography, Explanatory
Notes David Bradshaw 1998
Chronology Stephen Gill 1995

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First published as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 1998

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert), 18851930.
Women in Love/D. H. Lawrence: edited with an introduction and
notes by David Bradshaw.
(Oxford worlds classics)
Includes bibliographical references (p.).
1. Interpersonal relationsFiction. 2. Coal minersEngland
Fiction. 3. Coal mines and miningEnglandFiction.
4. EnglandSocial conditionsFiction. I. Bradshaw,
David. II. Title. III. Series.
PR6023.A93W6 1998 823.912dc21 9730892
ISBN 0192829955
5 7 9 10 8 6 4

Typeset by Pure Tech India Ltd., Pondicherry
Printed in Great Britain by
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Reading, Berkshire

When the open-ended Sons and Lovers was published on 29 May 1913, D. H. Lawrences own future was equally uncertain. He had published two previous novels (The White Peacock in 1911 and The Trespasser the following year) and with the appearance of his third he knew he had reached the end of [his] youthful period. He predicted, correctly, that The Sisters (as he called it) would be completed by June 1913. But his novel was far from finished; in fact, Lawrence had only just begun his long creative tussle with the body of writing which he would eventually shape into The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920).

In 1906 Lawrence told a friend that he was minded to adopt [t]he usual plan in his first novel and to take two couples and develop their relationships.turned into something more complex, but this is precisely the plan of Women in Love, in which the relationship between the school inspector Rupert Birkin and Ursula Brangwen, a teacher, is developed in parallel with the relationship between her artist sister, Gudrun, and Birkins friend Gerald Crich, an ex-army officer and the mine-owning son of a mine-owner. But neither of these is the most passionate relationship on view and there is nothing at all usual about Lawrences fifth and most extraordinary novel. Indeed, it is stunningly peculiar.