woman in love... NOT

"Women In Love is five hundred pages of passionate vehemence, wave after wave of turgid, exasperated writing impelled towards some distant and invisible end; the persistent underground beating of some dark and inaccessible sea in an underworld whose inhabitants are known by this alone, that they writhe continually, like the damned, in a frenzy of sexual awareness of one another. Their creator believes that he can distinguish the writhing of one from the writhing of another... to him they are utterly and profoundly different; to us they are all the same."

- John Middleton Murray


To be fair, I don't agree with this entirely - the characters are very distinct, and there's more to the novel than sex (though not much). And I must say that Lawrence is one of the most skilled, observant chroniclers of sexual politics I have ever encountered - his grasp of the complexities of the interactions between men and women (and between men and men, women and women) is probably second to none.

But oh, what kind of person must Lawrence have been, to have written a novel in which everything tends, turgidly and pulsatingly (and yes, that's the paradox), towards death and dissolution, and in which there is no love, only the will to power and the will to possess - no compassion, no tenderness, only animal desire either loosed or repressed.....

Lawrence is poison, and I need an antidote - NOW. Suggestions, anyone?
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