Women in Love is the sequel to D. H. Lawrence’s earlier novel The Rainbow (1915) that chronicles the continuing lives and loves of the Bragwen sisters in a midlands colliery town during the years leading up to the First World War. Gudren, a painter, carries on a stormy affair with Gerald Crich, owner of coal mine.  Ursula, a schoolteacher, strikes up a friendship with Rupert Birkin, an intellectual school inspector. The emotional atmosphere is charged by an overhanging attraction psychological and physical attraction between the two men. Emotions intensify after the deaths of Crich’s sister and father. When the couples embark on a holiday in the Alps, Gudrun takes up with a German artist, which provokes Gerald’s rage and further tragedy. The characters are modeled after Lawrence (Birkin), his wife Frieda (Ursula), and their friends the writers Katherine Mansfield (Gudren) and John Middleton Murry (Crich).  Much attention and talk is given to the social and political issues of the day.  Not surprisingly, the frank treatment of sexual matters was ahead of its time, and the book was first available only in the U. S. and only to small group of subscribers, owing to obscenity charges leveled against The Rainbow. It has come to be seen by critics such as Camille Paglia and Harold Bloom as an important influence on Western culture. The Modern Library ranked it 49th on its 1999 list of the 100 Best Novels in English of the 20th century.

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