![]() ![]() ![]() Reading it, you’ll feel alive.That aliveness might be a reaction against the terrible war during which it was written. You’ll race through it, I promise, caught up in its passion, its intensity, its extraordinary prose. There’s nothing dutiful or high-minded about it. But you don’t have to be a student to enjoy Women in Love. After all, it’s about young, intelligent, talented people figuring out how they want to live in the world, and what they will have to change to make that happen. The letter to Carswell continues, “But it is, it must be, the beginning of a new world too.” Perhaps that’s why my students love the novel so much. Its grim fascination with endings is balanced by a joyful appreciation of beginnings. To one of his most supportive friends, the Scottish writer Catherine Carswell, Lawrence admitted, “The book frightens me: it is so end-of-the-world.” Indeed, its working title was Dies Irae (Day of Wrath).Yet the book isn’t apocalyptic. It’s also intense and uncompromising, to the point that it daunted even its author. Lawrence’s masterpiece, Women in Love (1920), is one of the great novels of the twentieth century. ![]()
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