Explore the latest books of this year!
Bookbot

The Brangwens Series

This sweeping saga chronicles the fortunes and misfortunes of several generations of a family rooted in the English countryside. The works delve deeply into complex relationships, particularly romantic and marital ones, exploring the inner lives of characters with profound psychological insight. The author emphasizes emotional experience and the evolution of interpersonal dynamics, often employing naturalistic details to expose hidden desires and conflicts.

Women in Love
The Rainbow

Recommended Reading Order

  1. 1

    The Rainbow

    • 576 pages
    • 21 hours of reading
    3.8(53)Add rating

    "Set in the rural Midlands of England, The Rainbow (1915) revolves around three generations of the Brangwens, a strong, vigorous family, deeply involved with the land. When Tom Brangwen marries a Polish widow, Lydia Lensky, and adopts her daughter Anna as his own, he is unprepared for the passion that erupts between them. All are seeking individual fulfillment, but it is Ursula, Anna's spirited daughter, who, in her search for self-knowledge, rejects the traditional role of womanhood." "In his introduction, James Wood discusses Lawrence's writing style and the tensions and themes of The Rainbow. This Penguin edition reproduces the Cambridge text, which provides a text as close as possible to Lawrence's original. It also includes suggested further reading, a fragment of 'The Sisters II' from his first draft, and chronologies of Lawrence's life and of The Rainbow's Brangwen family."--BOOK JACKET.

    The Rainbow
  2. 2

    Women in Love

    3.7(68)Add rating

    "Seen by Lawrence as his most accomplished book, but subject to the initial prudery and incomprehension that met most of his fiction, Women in Love examines the regenerative and destructive aspects of human passion, as illustrated by its depiction of Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen - who first appeared in The Rainbow - and their relationships with Gerald Crich and Rupert Birkin. Set against the backdrop of a world consuming itself in war, the novel creates an instructive vision of humanity's dance with life and death." "This text is the famous "first" Women in Love, the unexpurgated version preferred by Lawrence himself, which was rejected by every publisher because of the banning of The Rainbow in 1915. More positive in tone than the revised version published in his lifetime, with different central relationships and a radically different ending, it is now viewed by many as Lawrence's masterpiece."--BOOK JACKET.

    Women in Love