Women in Love

About this book

Two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, return to their mining town in the English Midlands and become involved with two very different men: Rupert Birkin, a school inspector searching for a new kind of love, and Gerald Crich, the cold, efficient heir to the local coal mines. Their relationships move from the Midlands to the snowy Alps, where passion turns destructive.

Context and significance

D. H. Lawrence wrote the novel during the First World War as a sequel to The Rainbow, but publishers were afraid to print it until 1920. It is one of his most ambitious books, full of intense debates about love, industry and modern life. Read Sons and Lovers first, and see his life.

About the author

D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) was born in a mining town in Nottinghamshire, the son of a coal miner and a former teacher, and trained as a teacher himself. In 1912 he eloped with Frieda Weekley, the German wife of his former professor, and his novel Sons and Lovers (1913), drawn from his own family, made his name.

His next novel, The Rainbow, was banned, and he spent his last years travelling restlessly through Italy, Australia, Mexico and New Mexico, writing novels, poems, travel books and essays and painting. He died of tuberculosis in France at forty-four.