My personal feelings towards the book

Chapter 3 Class-room

This chapter is mainly the dialogue between Ursula Brangwen, Rupert Birkin and Hermione Roddice. The setting is in a class-room, where children are learning the art of catkins, a plant. At first, the presence of only Rupert was quiet, as Ursula observed his stillness in his actions. She was blushing and enjoying the conversation with Rupert. However, Hermione suddenly appears and acted in a way that readers, including me, will dislike. "She spoke all the while in a mocking, half teasing fashion, as if making game of the whole business."
She acted as if she was interested in the subject, but, however, treats it non-seriously. The presence of Hermione and the topics she brought up roused some attention, her blunt behaviour causes Ursula to feel "a spasm of anger and chagrin". When they left, Ursula "began to cry, bitterly, bitterly weeping: but whether for misery or joy, she never knew." This caused me to feel sorry for the confused and mixed up feelings inside Ursula.

Chapter 4 Diver

An important event was brought up in this chapter. It was revealed that Gerald Crinch killed his brother with a loaded gun when he was young. This stirred the Brangwen sisters into a mini debate on whether such a behaviour could be forgiven. To Gudrun, she thinks this is a frightful and horrible event. She says, "When one was a child, and having to carry the responsibility of it all through one's life." Ursula then brings up the possibility that there may be an unconscious will behind it, that "this playing at killing has some primitive desire for killing in it". However, Gudrun defensed strongly, saying that it seems to her the purest form of accident, and that they were only young boys who haven't grown up, where adults have instincts that prevents them from doing the wrong things.

I agree with Gudrun's point of view. Young kids are innocent and pure, they enjoy playing games with their siblings and friends. How could a child possibly have the desire to kill? The possibility is almost down to a zero.

Chapter 5 In the Train

I got a deeper insight towards the 2 main male characters Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crinch from this chapter, whilst they were traveling on the train, discussing worldly matters and their point of view towards various issues. Love, a main theme of the story, was brought up in their vivid discussion.

Video Clip

Below is a short excerpt from the movie Women In Love:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wgWEhCrnoI


Genres: Drama, Romance and Adaptation

Summary

Women in Love was written in the years before and during World War I. Criticized for its exploration of human sexuality, the novel is filled with symbolism and poetry--and is compulsively entertaining.

The story opens with sisters Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, characters who also appeared in The Rainbow, discussing marriage, then walking through a haunting landscape ruined by coal mines, smoking factories, and sooty dwellings. Soon Gudrun will choose Gerald, the icily handsome mining industrialist, as her lover; Ursula will become involved with Birkin, a school inspector--and an erotic interweaving of souls and bodies begins.

One couple will find love, the other death, in Lawrence's lush, powerfully crafted fifth novel, one of his masterpieces and the work that may best convey his beliefs about sex, love, and humankind's ongoing struggle between the forces of destruction and life.

In a small Midlands colliery town, sisters Ursula and Gudrun feel suffocated by provincial life and long for new experiences to broaden and enrich their unfulfilled lives. Both women fall in love, Ursula with Rupert Birkin, a school inspector and Gudrun with Gerald Critch, son of the local mine owner.

Women In Love is a passionate exploration of individual freedom, commitment and the very nature of love itself. Originally banned for its frank treatment of relations between the sexes, D.H. Lawrence's greatest novel is brought powerfully to life in the dramatization.

http://www.audiobooksonline.com/478419.html

Different Versions of the Book

Theme of Women in Love

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: David Herbert Lawrence

Rainbow (1915) and its sequel, Women in Love (1920), trace the sickness of modern civilization to the effects of industrialization upon the human psyche.

http://www.answers.com/topic/d-h-lawrence

Major Themes

Lawrence's constant struggle for a right relationship with women came to a climax in his encounter, liaison, and marriage with Frieda von Richthofen Weekley. They had met in 1912 and were married in 1914; their evolving relationship is reflected in all his work after Sons and Lovers. The fulfillment it meant to him can be seen most directly and poignantly in the volume of poems Look! We Have Come Through! (1917). Like Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow (1915) and Women In Love (1920) are set in England and reflect Lawrence's deep concern with the male-female relationship.

The Lawrences lived in many parts of the world - particularly, as place affected his work, in Italy, Australia, New Mexico, and Mexico. Embittered by the censorship of his work and the suspicion regarding his German-born wife during the war, Lawrence sought a propitious place where his friends and he might form a colony based on individuality and talent rather than possessions. This he never realized for more than brief periods. There were quarrels and desertions, and his precarious health was a factor in the constant moves. At the end of his life he wistfully regarded himself as lacking in the societal self. He died in Vence, France, on March 2, 1930.

Lawrence's work from the war onward traces his search. His work's rhythm he described as the exploring of situations in his fiction (and, one might add, his poetry) and then the abstracting and consolidating of his thought in essays, some of book-length, like Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921), Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), and, at the very end, Apocalypse (1931). For the Australian phase there is the novel Kangaroo (1923); for New Mexico, various short stories, poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), the novelette St. Mawr (1925), and essays, particularly those on the Indian dances; for Mexico, the novel The Plumed Serpent (1926) and the sketches titled Mornings in Mexico (1927); for the Mediterranean area with its pagan traditions, the novels The Lost Girl (1920) and Aaron's Rod (1922) and the novelettes Sun (1928) and The Man Who Died (1931). Toward the last his imagination returned to his English origins for the scene and characters of his most notorious and controversial novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). The novelette The Virgin and the Gipsy (1930) reflects the same concern.

All through his career Lawrence's boldness in treating the sexual side of his characters' relationships had aroused the censorious. For example, The Rainbow was originally withdrawn and destroyed by the publisher after a complaint. But in Lady Chatterley's Lover, his last full-length novel, Lawrence went much further. The book was banned in England, and this was followed by the seizure of the manuscript of his poems Pansies and the closing of an exhibition of his paintings.

http://www.answers.com/topic/d-h-lawrence

D.H. Lawrence's biography

Name at birth: David Herbert Lawrence
Born: 11 September 1885
Birthplace: Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England
Died: 2 March 1930 (tuberculosis)
Best Known As: Author of Lady Chatterly's Lover

D.H. Lawrence was an English novelist, poet and critic, most famous for his novels Sons and Lovers (1913) and Lady Chatterly's Lover (1928). After a brief career as a teacher, Lawrence devoted himself to writing and in 1911 published his first novel, The White Peacock. In 1912 he ran off with Frieda von Richtenhof Weekley, the wife of a Nottingham University professor; after her divorce in 1914, she and Lawrence married and began travelling while he worked on his writing. They travelled through Europe and North America until his death, from tuberculosis, in 1930.

Lawrence's novels are known for Oedipal anxieties and sometimes explicit descriptions of sexual relationships, a rarity in literature at the time and shocking to his contemporaries. Lady Chatterly's Lover, probably his best-known work, was considered "obscene" and was banned in the United States and England for three decades. After the 1960's, however, his books became required reading for most university students, and he is still considered an influential figure of 20th century literature. His other works include the novels Women in Love (1921), The Plumed Serpent (1926) and The Rainbow (1915), the play David (1926), poems collected in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1925) and a book of criticism, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923).

The English novelist, poet, and essayist David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) took as his major theme the relationship between men and women, which he regarded as disastrously wrong in his time.

Born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, on Sept. 11, 1885, D. H. Lawrence was the son of a little-educated coal miner and a mother of middle-class origins who fought with the father and his limited way of life so that the children might escape it or, as Lawrence once put it, "rise in the world." Their quarrel and estrangement, and the consequent damage to the children, became the subject of perhaps his most famous novel, Sons and Lovers (1913). Critics immediately regarded it as a brilliant illustration of Sigmund Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex. Lawrence was trained to be a teacher at Nottingham University College and taught at Davidson Road School in Croydon until 1912, when his health failed. The great friend of his youth, Jessie Chambers, who was the real-life counterpart of Miriam in Sons and Lovers, had sent some of his work to the English Review. The editor, Ford Madox Ford, hailed him at once as a find, and Lawrence began his writing career.

My response

My novel, Women in Love, started with two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen having an intimate sisterly conversation about an important step in life, that is, marriage. Gudrun wanted to know whether Ursula want to get married, yet Ursula replied in a calm and considerate manner that she's not sure and she even once rejected several. The conversation further led to another issue, whether they should have children or not. But soon the conversation trailed off, focusing on why Gudrun had come back home. Gudrun replied, "I think my coming bak home was just reculer pour mieux sauter", meaning "to move back to better jumping." The awkwardness Ursula felt came to an end when Gudrun suggested to go out and look at the wedding.
I admire the way the author, D.H. Lawrence described the landscape and sceneries the sisters passed on their way to the wedding, "a valley with collieries, and opposite hills with cornfields and woods, all blackened with distance, as if seen through a veil of crape. White and black smoke rose up in steady columns, magic within the dark air." The image of the darkness and creepiness left Gudrun feeling bewildered.
When the sisters finally came to the wedding, the description of the guests and bridesmaids amazed me, especially the description of Hermione Roddice, a friend of the Criches. "She drifted forward as if scarcely conscious, her long, blenched face lifted up, not to see the world." Not only did D.H. Lawrence emphasize the arrogant behaviour through the behaviour of Hermione, but the reactions of people around her, gave me a deeper insight of this intimidating person. "People were silent when she passed, impressed, roused, wanting to jeer, yet for some reason silenced." The world seemed to stop revolving in the presence of such a character.
Last by not least, the fair, good-looking, healthy, energy-served fellow, Gerald Crich that attracted Gudrun, left me eager to find out what is going to happen between them. :)

Jennifer's ISP novel

Title: Women in Love
Author: D.H. Lawrence
Categories: Fiction, Romance, Sexuality
Published in 1920

http://manybooks.net/print/lawrencedhetext03wmnlv10.html

Database from the London Public Library:
STAGING THE GAZE IN D.H. LAWRENCE’S WOMEN IN LOVE
Source: Studies in the Novel; Fal94, Vol.26 Issue 3, p268, 13p