I wasn't making any progress with Ivanhoe. No wonder it was so despised in Up the Down Staircase. What the hell is the point? If it's supposed to be an adventure novel, it needs to have more buckles swashed than its first several score pages had. Project Gutenberg had Women in Love, though, and after only a litte bit I was bowled over.
Conversations like these characters' never do happen, but they read well. Except that the Project Gutenberg text rendered all the italics as ALL CAPS and that made characters shrill and melodramatic. I turned all the stupid British "inverse commas" into quotation marks as is right and proper and then easily could find and replace quotations in contractions and possessives, but if strings of capitals can even be sought in Word, I don't know how.
And no wonder it's on the Triangle list. It seems, three chapters in, that I maybe won't hate the characters as much as I did those in Sons and Lovers, and reading it lets me understand A.S. Byatt (who did her thesis on D.H. Lawrence) better, even just her care with sensual details of physical surroundings.
Although I know Lawrence is 20th century--1920s, pretty much?--I associate him with Thomas Hardy for their rural settings (Lancashire, Wessex, it's all one), and I began this while also reading The Portrait of a Lady, so electricity and automobiles startle me more than they ought.
What struck me while reading:
All books are one book: in Messenger, one of the meals Seer and Matty cook is rabbit. One of the purposes of coal-mining, someone disdains in in Women in Love, is to cook a rabbit.
Chapter VIII reads like a parody of itself. This Gutenberg text renders all italicized text into capitals, which makes Lawrence read like J.K. Rowling (one character is named Hermione, and a chapter is entitled Moony) or like Jean Auel fan fic, which I certainly have never ever read.
Chapter XVIII: "Soon, however, they met in a kind of make-belief world. Winifred did not notice human beings unless they were like herself, playful and slightly mocking. She would accept nothing but the world of amusement, and the serious people of her life were the animals she had for pets. On those she lavished, almost ironically, her affection and her companionship. To the rest of the human scheme she submitted with a faint bored indifference."
Before chapter XXVI, I hated the characters' unreality and was left only cold by the their running hot and cold with each other. So chapter XXVI, about a chair, was a nice break. I could sit back and think platonic thoughts for a while.
Isn't this a which splice or something similar? "Every woman he comes across he wants to make her in love with him." The sentence would be correct without the accusative pronoun. I mean "her," but this book throws in so much French and German that I want to retaliate with Latin.
With the exceptions of the scenes or chapters above, I mostly hated it, because the characters were so unreal. The end slightly redeemed what had gone before but did not justify it.