Women in Love (Penguin Classics) Paperback – September 25, 2007

If you like philosophical ruminations and especially if you are interested in the nature of love and what makes people compatible in close relationships, this novel has a great deal to offer. Lawrence takes four main characters (and a number of minor ones, as well) and examines why they succeed or fail in their search for a satisfying partner in life. One of these persons is a man of the world, a man of action, but also a man who cannot let down his guard and do what his heart tells him. Another is an artist who needs to love someone who understands her aesthetic of the world and finds money or good looks ultimately meaningless. A third wants a simple and complete partnership with someone who will love her as she is without complications. The fourth is a restless thinker (probably Lawrence himself) who finds conventional love all well and good, but hopes there is something that goes beyond it, something that results in a new and even impersonal state ‘like a star balanced with another star.' I over-simplify all this, of course; there is so much more to it. I might add that Lawrence touches on many other issues in the course of the story such as class behavior, the mechanization of society and death itself – all worthy of notice. In the end, Women in Love is a moving meditation on life which I highly recommend.

Women in Love tells the story of two sisters and their adventures and misadventures in romance. But it is anything but the kind of courtships so nobly portrayed in Jane Austen’s novels. Lawrence wants to go beyond courtship, beyond romance, even beyond love to a kind of cosmic union of male and female. He also strives to portray a friendship between men that is just as strong as that between man and woman.Lawrence, of course, celebrates the physical and while there is a religious element in his unions it is anything but conventional Christianity. It more corresponds, if it corresponds to anything beyond Lawrence’s own thought, to Eastern spiritual traditions. Somehow the bond between man and woman is caught up into the mystery of existence, which, if it could be put into words, wouldn’t be a mystery after all.More than in Lady Chatterly’s Lover, the reader is left to ponder why the narrated romantic relationships go right and wrong. Is it simply differences in emotion, egotism or disparate worldviews? Or is there something more primordial in a romance that ends tragically? Women in Love invites close reading and rereading to answer these kind of questions.One somewhat stain on Lawrence’s novels is that he has his characters rattle off philosophical musings right in the middle of romantic scenes. It’s a little bit like Shakespeare. You have to suspend your disbelief that Hamlet could speak such eloquent monologues in the midst of a personal crisis.But for those who like a blend of physicality, philosophy and spirituality in their romantic novels, Lawrence’s Women in Love is bound to resonate. It would be ridiculous to call it essential reading, but I enjoyed it and I can only imagine that many readers of classics will enjoy it as well. Recommended to those with interests like those described above.

Because Amazon has made it sooo easy to download the classics, I am going through some of D. H. Lawrence. I LOVED Sons and Lovers and am familiar with Lady Chatterley so decided to try this one. It is hard to know how to rate it. The characters are endlessly philosophizing in long monlologues and that can get tedious. And, of course, I find their viewpoints quite different from how we would approach the questions regarding the meaning of life today. Yet the characters themselves bind you so that it is hard to put down. Lawrence must have been working out some very heavy personal issues when he wrote this! I'm glad I read it and am curious to see how it fits into the rest of Lawrence's work. This makes me hungry.Thanks, Amazon, for making these classics available for FREE! I've no excuses now not to read all the things I meant to. If only life didn't get in the way!

I needed a paperback of this title so I could read it Penguin classic is a bonus because of the criticism

Widely regarded as D. H. Lawrence's greatest novel, Women in Love is both a lucid account of English society before the First World War, and a brilliant evocation of the inexorable power of human desire.Women in Love continues where The Rainbow left off, with the third generation of Brangwens: Ursula Brangwen, now a teacher at Beldover, a mining town in the Midlands, and her sister Gudrun, who has returned from art school in London. The focus of the novel is primarily on their relationships, Ursula's with Rupert Birkin, a school inspector, and Gudrun's with industrialist Gerald Crich, and later with a sculptor, Loerke. Quintessentially modernist, Women in Love is one of Lawrence's most extraordinary, innovative and unsettling works.

The odds are, if you've made it this far then you'll know what you're looking for as far as D.H Lawrence is concerned.Go on, buy it. You know what's in store for you 😊

Não apreciei o estilo de escrita, os personagens, especialmente as mulheres, não tiveram profundidade. A história em si também não é envolvente

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Il mio libro preferito di DH Lawrence fin dai lontani tempi universitari, l’ho letto tre volte in tre lingue diverse.