One of the greatest of twentieth-century novelists and poets, D. H. Lawrence wrote and lived with a passionate intensity that shocked his contemporaries. Lawrence composed Women in Love while at the height of his powers, and indeed, in its blend of lyricism, psychological revelation, and an eroticism that is never very far from violence, it can still startle and even discomfit readers. In this story of two very unconventional sisters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, and the men they love, Lawrence argues urgently for a new conjunction between man and woman as "two pure beings, each constituting the freedom of the other." The ardent struggle of human souls coming into being, and into relationship with one another, is at the heart of Women in Love, and this wrenching, sometimes painful, thoroughly exhilarating process is brilliantly illuminated in Lawrence's masterpiece.