D.H. Lawrence is the writer your students think they'll hate — until they actually read him. And then they still might hate him. But they won't forget him.
I started Women in Love on a Saturday morning walk along the lakefront with Denise, and by the time we'd circled back home, I was so deep into the Brangwen sisters' world that I sat in the car for another twenty minutes pretending to look for my keys. Denise knew. She always knows.
Lawrence Doesn't Want You Comfortable
Let me be direct: Women in Love is not an easy listen. Twenty-five hours of Lawrence's prose is a commitment, and this isn't the kind of novel that rewards half-attention. Lawrence writes the way a fever dreams — long, winding passages about desire and repulsion and the strange electricity between people who can't stop circling each other. Gerald Crich and Gudrun Brangwen are locked in something that feels less like love and more like mutual destruction, while Ursula and Birkin fumble toward a different kind of intimacy, one that's all philosophical argument dressed up as pillow talk.
Birkin is Lawrence's mouthpiece, and he knows it, and Lawrence knows you know it. The man delivers monologues about the nature of love and consciousness that would get him laughed out of any modern coffee shop — but there's something painfully honest underneath the pretension. This reminds me of what Hemingway said about prose being architecture, not interior decoration. Lawrence does the opposite. It's all interior — rooms within rooms within rooms — and somehow it holds.
The novel's real tension lives in what's not said. The chapter where Gerald and Birkin wrestle by the fire — ostensibly just two friends blowing off steam — carries an erotic charge Lawrence never names directly. That unadmitted attraction between the two men is the book's hidden engine, and in 1920, Lawrence couldn't spell it out. He didn't need to. The prose does the work through rhythm and repetition, circling the unspeakable until you feel it in your chest.
My students would hate this. I love it.
Ruth Golding Makes Twenty-Five Hours Feel Earned
Here's where this particular audiobook earns its keep. Ruth Golding's narration is the reason I stayed with Lawrence through his most indulgent passages — and Lawrence has many indulgent passages. Her voice has this quality I can only describe as intelligent warmth. She reads Lawrence's longer philosophical stretches the way a good teacher explains a difficult concept: with patience, but without condescension.
What impressed me most was her work with the minor characters. Hermione Roddice — Gerald's ex, this brittle aristocratic presence who hovers over the early chapters like a storm cloud — gets a voice from Golding that's all controlled tension, clipped vowels barely containing something unhinged. When Hermione snaps (and she does snap, literally swinging a lapis lazuli paperweight at Birkin's head), the shift in Golding's delivery is genuinely startling. And her Pussum — the bohemian young woman Gerald takes up with in London — has this breathy, slightly vacant quality that tells you everything about the character's social position before Lawrence's narration catches up.
The narrator understands that pause is punctuation. Golding doesn't rush the silences between characters, which matters enormously in a novel where so much communication happens in the gaps. At 1.0x — yes, I listened at 1.0x, the author chose those words — her pacing felt right. The prose deserves to be savored, even when Lawrence is testing your patience with another three-page meditation on the metaphysics of desire.
One listener I came across called the novel "shallow flapdoodle" and said even Golding couldn't save it. I've seen that same divide play out with readers of Stolen White Elephant — some readers call it self-indulgent, others find it quietly devastating, and both camps are somehow right. I understand the frustration. Lawrence can feel like he's drowning you in sensation. But I'd argue that's the point. He's not trying to tell you a story so much as make you feel a particular quality of consciousness. And Golding gets that.
Who This Is (and Isn't) For
If you loved The Rainbow and want to see what happens to Ursula Brangwen next — this is the payoff. If you've never read Lawrence but you've enjoyed Middlemarch or Jude the Obscure (novels that take the interior lives of their characters as seriously as their plots), this is worth the investment. If you loved E.M. Forster's Howards End, Women in Love is its darker, more unsettling cousin — same class anxieties, less restraint.
But if you need plot momentum to stay engaged, if you want things to happen at a clip — look elsewhere. Lawrence is playing a different game. Long stretches of this novel are two people in a room talking about what love is, and you're either in for that or you're not.
This is also not background listening. I tried it once while grading a stack of sophomore essays at 11 PM and realized I'd missed an entire chapter. Lawrence demands your frontal lobe.
Worth Pausing the Faculty Meeting For
This is why we still read the classics. Not because they're old, but because they mapped emotional territory we're still navigating a hundred years later. Gerald and Gudrun's toxic spiral, Birkin's desperate search for a love that doesn't consume — these aren't period problems. Ruth Golding's narration turns Lawrence's dense, sometimes maddening prose into something close to music. Twenty-five hours is a lot. But the good ones always are.
