'I can only write what pretty strongly about: and that, at present, is the relations between men and women.
A powerful and engrossing tale of extremes and extremists, Women in Love (1920) follows the passionate relationships of two sisters, Gudrun and Ursula Brangwen, with their respective lovers, the ominous Gerald Crich and the charismatic but fragile Rupert Birkin. Beginning in a narrow-minded English colliery town and culminating amidst the ice and snow of the Alps, the abortive alliance between the two men and the couples' affairs are played out against the derangements of industrialism and the need to find new ways of living and better ways of dying.
The violence and bitterness of the First World War breach every page of the novel, just as the slaughter of the trenches occupied Lawrence's mind at the time of writing. He considered it 'the best of my novels, exploring through it his belief that love is' the great creative process''. No Modernist text is more highly charged with the conflict of love and death, or more profoundly unsettling.