D.H. Lawrence’s novel, Women in Love, was published in the U.S. on November 9, 1920. Stunning and maddening in equal parts, it was championed by literary critics in the 1950s for its moral seriousness, lauded by critics in the 1960s for its focus on human sexuality, crushed by feminist critics in the 1970s as phallocentric and misogynist, and revived by contemporary scholars who illuminate Lawrence as an inventive modernist, environmentalist, and feminist.

Born into a miner’s family in Nottinghamshire in 1885, Lawrence’s life was brief and peripatetic. In March 1912 he met Frieda Weekly, the German wife of a professor at Nottingham University College. The two fled England for the continent two months later and married in July 1914. Until Lawrence’s death from tuberculosis in 1930, they traveled constantly, living on four continents.

Usually broke and often in poor health, Lawrence’s output is astonishing. He authored novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, translations, literary criticism and thousands of letters. Of the novels, WL, written in a cottage in Cornwall in 1916, is considered his greatest. Reading 125 pages of the novel each week, we will examine the central theme of WL - the need to create relationships and lives that transcend the directives of the ego – within the historical framework of Edwardian England, European modernism, and World War I.