Women in Love

Women In Love, the book Lawrence considered his best, was written during World War I, and while that conflict is never mentioned in the novel, a sense of background danger, of lurking catastrophe, continually informs its drama of two couples dynamically engaged in a struggle with themselves, with each other, and with life's intractable limitations. Lawrence was a powerful, prophetic writer, but in addition he brought such delicacy to his treatment of the human and natural worlds that E. M. Forster's claim that he was the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation does him too little justice rather than too much.

David Ellis is the author of Lawrence's Non-Fiction: Art, Thought and Genre and Wordsworth, Freud and the Spots of Time. He has been commissioned to write Volume HI of the New Cambridge biography of Lawrence.