D. Lawrence

Keď román Milenec lady Chatterleyovej vyšiel po prvý raz, spôsobil šok a všeobecné pobúrenie. Autor v ňom totiž otvorene opísal sexuálny milenecký vzťah a použil také výrazy z oblasti erotiky, aké sa v anglickej literatúre, dovtedy spútanej viktoriánskym pokrytectvom a prudériou, nikdy predtým neobjavili. Príbeh mladej lady Connie, manželstvom pripútanej k urodzenému, za vojny doživotne zmrzačenému manželovi a obrodenej fyzickou láskou k prostému hájnikovi Mellorsovi, vyjadruje vieru v obrodnú moc „novej sexuality“ v rámci realistického príbehu. Román bol zakázaný ako nemravný a pornografický a v plnom znení vyšiel až tridsať rokov po autorovej smrti.

"Women in Love" is widely regarded as D. H. Lawrence´s greatest novel. The novel continues where: "The Rainbow" left off with the third generation of Brangwens: Ursula Brangwen, now a teacher at Beldover, a mining town in the Midlands, and her sister Gudr

To be oneself was a supreme, gleaming triumph of infinity This is the insight that flashes upon Ursula as she struggles to assert her individuality and to stand separate from her family and her surroundings on the brink of womanhood and the modern world. In The Rainbow (1915) Lawrence challenged the customary limitations of language and convention to carry into the structure of his prose the fascination with boundaries and space that characterize the entire novel. Condemned and suppressed on its first publication for its open treatment of sexuality and its 'unpatriotic' spirit, the novel chronicles the lives of three generations of the Brangwen family over a period of more than 60 years, setting them against the emergence of modern England. The central figure of ursula becomes the focus of Lawrence's examination of relationships and the conflicts they bring, and the inextricable mingling of the physical and the spiritual. Suffused with biblical imagery, The Rainbow addresses searching human issues in a setting of precise and vivid detail. In her introduction to this edition Kate Flint illuminates Lawrence's aims and achievements against the background of the burgeoning century.

Lawrence's first major novel was also the first in the English language to explore ordinary working-class life from the inside. No writer before or since has written so well about the intimacies enforced by a tightly-knit mining community and by a fa mily where feelings are never hidden for long. When the marriage between Walter Morel and his sensitive, high-minded wife begins to break down, the bitterness of their frustration seeps into their children's lives. Their second son, Paul, craves the warmth of family and community, but knows that he must sacrifice everything in the struggle for independence if he is not to repeat his parents' failure. Lawrence's powerful description of Paul's single-minded efforts to define himself sexually and e motionally through relationships with two women - the innocent, old-fashioned Miriam Leivers and the experienced, provocatively modern Clara Dawes - makes this a novel as much for the beginning of the twenty-first century as it was for the beginning of the twentieth.

Tato kniha z roku 1928 byla ještě v roce 1960 nařčena z pornografie a málem zakázána. Vedle otevřených popisů milostných vztahů ženy provdané za ochrnutého muže však přináší i kritiku společnosti a jejího uspořádání. Stala se předlohou řady adaptací, včetně českého filmu režiséra Viktora Polesného (1998) nebo francouzsko-belgické verze Pascale Ferranové (2006), oceněné pěti Césary.