Women in love

The novel tells of the relationships of two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, who live in a Midland colliery town in the years before the First World War. Ursula falls in love with Birkin (a thinly disguised portrait of Lawrence himself) and Gudrun has an intense but tragic affair with Gerald, the son of a local colliery owner. (www.goodreads.com)

The description above is short but to the point.
Women in love is about two sisters who think they know what love is and both strive to perfect its art.

Ursula, the more romantic of the two sisters, has set her sights on Birkin, a rather quaint and seclusive man bend on suffering and searching in vain for an ultimate connection.
He demands a sacrifice of Ursula, the sacrifice of being her own person with her own thoughts and wishes. Instead she needs to be part of him, an extension that will expand his vision instead of a barrier to which his ideas might break and wither away.

Gudrun, who is remote and cold in comparison to Ursula, falls under the thrall of Gerald, a local from a wealthy family. He's a kind of don Juan, willing women to find him attractive.
As they both try to form some kind of bond, both are unwilling to sacrifice anything to build something together.
Gudrun wants to be understood without giving the slightest indications, while Gerald thinks love is about possessing. Both are so sure of their way of the world, that the least change will scare them away.

Both sisters start out the same. Single and with a stubborn attitude towards society and what is expected of them.
By the end of this novel, their lives couldn't have been more different.

All the while Lawrence sets out to point out every little detail of their emotional life. Nothing much happens, but everything is wrought with emotion so even the smallest detail can have the most significance in the end.

I'm glad I've read it. It never felt like an assignment I had to get through.
It felt like a very emotional briefing of two relationships. I didn't always agree with the views of the author but he did realise to create four characters with completely different ideas which isn't easy.
It's a good example of novels of that age, so I would recommend it if you liked other novels from the early 20's.

Review of Lady Chatterley's Lover

Author: D.H. Lawrence
Published in 1928
Thickness: 376 pages
Personal rating: 3 stars

In short


The story concerns a young married woman, Constance (Lady Chatterley), whose upper-class husband, Clifford Chatterley, has been paralyzed and rendered impotent. Her sexual frustration leads her into an affair with the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. This novel is about Constance's realisation that she cannot live with the mind alone; she must also be alive physically. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Chatterley%27s_Lover)


My two cents

My first impression of this novel was not of a good nature. I found the beginning to be excrutiatingly longwinding and boring. A good deal over its midst, the novel began to be interesting, with the love affair between her and her gamekeeper and its far reaching results. 

Lady Chatterley, a woman of questionable moral, is married to a nobleman who got wounded in the war and lost the function of his lower body. Chained to a sexless marriage and with love slowly seeping out, Lady Chatterley, also named Connie, seeks her thrills elsewhere. Do not think this is impulsive or even selfish of her, since she nearly breaks down from the lack of physical and emotional love. Only the warm touch of one servant, the game-keeper, makes her sky clear again and her vision for the future bright. 

Having been brought up quite liberally with having had the permission for an affair while she was away at college, her father had tried to coerce her husband into letting her have a love affair, afraid she would be turning into a demi-virgin. A virgin, not of mind, but of body.
Her husband, Sir Clifford, gave her that permission and even granted her the wish to conceive a child with the unknown party, as long as he himself never had to know any details. 

Connie, betrayed by her first lover on an emotional base, tries to seek refuge in her world, but finds only superficial men who treat love as if it be a verb instead of something that is or isn’t. Women do not have meaning in their life, or they depend too much upon them. Neither is what Connie seeks and falling away in apathy she breaks down in tears in front of the game keeper, who sees her for who she is and straightforwardly gives her what she needs, even if it took her a while to see it for what it was.
Mellors, the gamekeeper, has been searching for a true woman all his life, a woman who isn’t afraid of the sexual act and who doesn’t use it to get her way or as punishment. 

Through the sexual escapades between him and Connie, he begins to learn how a true love affair is supposed to be like and despite his ironic and pessimistic demeanor, when Connie tells him she’s expecting his child, he has given her his heart and they will try to be together however difficult the odds. 

I know I’ve told a lot of spoilers in my summary, but this novel isn’t so much about the content as it goes about an age changing. The age of noblemen making way for the industrialization. The fall of one empire, to give life to another.