![]() ![]() And Lawrence, who was better at vituperation, returned the compliment with interest, calling Joyce "a clumsy olla putrida. "Lush," was his only comment after someone read to him from Lady Chatterley's Lover. "The man writes really badly," Joyce said of Lawrence. Neither writer cared much for the other's work. ![]() "If only one might create the future after one's own heart," Rupert Birkin, the novel's intellectual, thinks - one's heart being the only thing left intact. "Every man who is acutely alive is acutely wrestling with his own soul." Joyce, too, was acutely wrestling with his own soul.īoth novels had been preoccupying their writers for many years, and both are nominally set before or apart from the first world war: Ulysses in a 24-hour period in 1904, Women in Love we are not entirely sure when, though there is, in the final pages, a lightning-bolt reference to the Kaiser's washing his hands of the catastrophe - " Ich habe es nicht gewollt " ("I didn't intend this to happen") - and it is impossible to escape the conclusion that the longing for newness and change that pervades the novel is a response to the ruination of war. ![]() "We are now in a period of crisis," Lawrence wrote in his foreword to the American edition of Women in Love. The two greatest novels written in English in the 20th century were published within a year of each other, DH Lawrence's Women in Love in 1921, James Joyce's Ulysses in 1922 - not coincidentally if one accepts that new centuries brew up an infection of creative fervency. ![]()
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