Women in Love (1920) is a novel by British author D. H. Lawrence. It is
a sequel to his earlier novel The Rainbow (1915), and follows the
continuing loves and lives of the Brangwen sisters, Gudrun and Ursula.
Gudrun Brangwen, an artist, pursues a destructive relationship with
Gerald Crich, an industrialist. Lawrence contrasts this pair with the
love that develops between Ursula Brangwen and Rupert Birkin, an
alienated intellectual who articulates many opinions associated with the
author. The emotional relationships thus established are given further
depth and tension by an intense psychological and physical attraction
between Gerald and Rupert. The novel ranges over the whole of British
society before the time of the First World War and eventually concludes
in the snows of the Tyrolean Alps. Ursula's character draws on
Lawrence's wife Frieda and Gudrun's on Katherine Mansfield, while Rupert
Birkin's has elements of Lawrence himself, and Gerald Crich is partly
based on Mansfield's husband, John Middleton Murry.