A new relativity

It has long been recognised that Women in Love relates to The Rainbow in a more complex fashion than being simply the second half of an originally integral conception. Women in Love became a different kind of book. In particular, the ‘struggle’ of the characters towards a new emotional consciousness is more inextricably a formal and rhetorical struggle of the book itself. Furthermore, the intrinsic strains in the form and rhetoric of the novel were exacerbated by Lawrence's personal ‘nightmare’ of the war years. Although it was part of Lawrence's peculiar triumph in the novel to dramatise these tensions, the book is not entirely able to resolve them. And in this respect, the difficulties of Women in Love proved to be premonitory of the rest of his novelistic æuvre. The move on from The Rainbow brought him to what with hindsight we can see as the pivotal crux of his career. He never again wrote a full-length novel of the quality and ambition of these two. The full force of this can only be seen in the light of the later works but the essential issues are already focused in the development of the ontological theme as encapsulated in the narrative language, or languages, of Women in Love.