D. H. Lawrence Women in Love

Transcription

1 Running Head http// Literature Insights General Editor: Charles Moseley D. H. Lawrence Women in Love Neil Roberts You mustn t look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character For advice on use of this ebook please scroll to page 2

2 Publication Data Neil Roberts, 2007 The Author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act Published by Humanities-Ebooks.co.uk Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE Reading Options * To use the navigation tools, the search facility, and other features of the Adobe toolbar, this Ebook should be read in default view. * To navigate through the contents use the hyperlinked Bookmarks at the left of the screen. * To search, expand the search column at the right of the screen or click on the binocular symbol in the toolbar. * For ease of reading, use <CTRL+L> to enlarge the page to full screen * Use <Esc> to return to the full menu. * Hyperlinks appear in Blue Underlined Text. Licence and permissions This book is licensed for a particular computer or computers. The file itself may be copied, but the copy will not open until the new user obtains a licence from the Humanities-Ebooks website in the usual manner. The original purchaser may license the same work for a second computer by applying to support@humanities-ebooks.co.uk with proof of purchase. Permissions: it is permissible to print sections of the book (in draft mode) for your own use, but not to copy and paste text. ISBN

3 A Note on the Author Neil Roberts studied English at the University of Cambridge where he took an MA and PhD. Since 1970 he has taught at the University of Sheffield, where he is Professor of English Literature. He is the author of George Eliot: Her Beliefs and Her Art (Elek, 1975), Ted Hughes: A Critical Study (with Terry Gifford, Faber, 1981), The Lover, the Dreamer and the World: the Poetry of Peter Redgrove (Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), Meredith and the Novel (Macmillan, 1997), Narrative and Voice in Postwar Poetry (Longman, 1999), D. H. Lawrence, Travel and Cultural Difference (Palgrave, 2004) and Ted Hughes: A Literary Life (Palgrave, 2006), and editor of A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry (Blackwell, 2001).

4 Contents A Note on the Author Part 1: The context of Women in Love 1.1 General Introduction 1.2 Lawrence s early life and work 1.3 The composition of Women in Love 1.4 Women in Love and the First World War 1.5 People, Places and Libel Threats 1.6 Sexuality 1.7 Class Part 2: Artistic Influences and Strategies 2.1 Tradition and Experiment 2.2 Thomas Hardy and the Russian Novel 2.3 You mustn t look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character 2.4 Modernist movements: Futurism, Imagism, Expressionism 2.5 Morality and the Novel Part 3: Reading Women in Love Part 4: Reception Part 5: Bibliography 5.1 Main text 5.2 Other works by Lawrence 5.3 Biography 5.4 Criticism 5.4 Other works Part 6: Hyperlinked Materials

5 Part 1: The context of Women in Love 1.1 General Introduction When Lawrence s reputation was at its height, in the 1950s and 60s, Women in Love was considered his greatest novel and, by some readers, the greatest English novel of the twentieth century. It is his most ambitious and experimental work, and attempts a radical critique of the modern world, and particularly of modern British society, at the moment when that world was coming into being, in the middle of the First World War. Lawrence s reputation has declined since then, and readers who still admire his work are likely to espouse a more diverse Lawrence, whose qualities are spread over many and various works. However, Women in Love remains one of the most stimulating and challenging texts of the early twentieth century, and if today s readers are more likely than their predecessors to question its coherence and ideology, it contains some of the most brilliant writing in the literature of its period. In the first part of this study I shall be looking at various aspects of the context of the novel. What is its position in Lawrence s work as a whole, and how does it relate to the works that went before it? What does it tells us about Lawrence s relationship to the world he came from, the Nottinghamshire mining community? When and in what circumstances was the novel written? How should we understand its often puzzling representation of such matters as class and sexuality? In Part 2 I shall be discussing the specifically artistic aspects of the work, Part 3 will consist of a chapter-by-chapter analysis, and in Part 4 I shall trace the novel s critical reception. 1.2 Lawrence s early life and work The main setting of the novel, Beldover, is closely modelled on Lawrence s birthplace, the mining town of Eastwood in Nottinghamshire, where he spent the first twentythree years of his life. His father was a barely literate coal-miner and his mother was what in a late poem he sarcastically called a superior soul : she did not, in fact, come from a socially or economically superior background to that of his father, but she became disenchanted with the rough manners of her working-class husband, and