The Bright Book of Life by Harold Bloom

REREADING Women in Love after many years, I discover it to be strangely distant from what I had recalled. Several decades ago, I knew the book so fully that I anticipated many paragraphs, even chapters, but in those days I had a kind of provisional belief in Lawrence. The book now appears stranger and richer, more original than I had recalled. Ambivalences of the will, modes of being are represented by a sharpness that seems uncanny, since the power to suggest so many complex apprehensions could be judged without precedent in the novel.

Lawrence on his heights astonishes, almost showing what cannot be shown. The Rainbow and Women in Love are his triumphs, equaled only by a number of his poems and by many of his short stories. In the endless war between men and women, Lawrence fights on both sides. He is superb at giving us really murderous lovers' quarrels, as in Chapter 23, "Excurse," of Women in Love, where Ursula and Birkin suffer one of their encounters upon what Lawrence calls "this memorable battlefield": "I jealous! I - jealous! You are mistaken if you think that. I'm not jealous in the least of Hermione, she is nothing to me, not that! " And Ursula snapped her fingers. "No, it's you who are a liar. It's you who must return, like a dog to his vomit. It is what Hermione stands for that I hate. I hate it. It is lies, it is false, it is death. But you want it, you can't help it, you can't help yourself. You belong to that old, deathly way of living - then go back to it. But don't come to me, for I've nothing to do with it. "