Women in Love: The First

ELT 43 : 2 2000 once the reader has become acclimated to this warm and fuzzy atmosphere . Nevertheless, Adeline Tintner's Henry James's Legacy likely constitutes the most comprehensive work yet published on the "afterlife" of James's fiction; she doesn't miss an allusion. However, what Tintner does miss, or simply leaves to others, is the panoramic vista, the broad, inclusive sweep. Tintner elucidates James's legacy to individual works and writers, but not to Literature writ large. Then again, perhaps she knows James too well to suppose that a single critic in a single work can encompass a figure and influence of such proportions. There are, as she observes in her dedication, "future legatees, who no doubt stand waiting in the wings." For those inevitable volumes yet to be written on the voluminous James, Henry James's Legacy may well serve as the first installment from an inexhaustible estate. Jim Barloen __________________ The University of Kansas Women in Love: The First D. H. Lawrence. The First 'Women in Love". John Worthen and Lindeth Vasey, eds. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Iv + 532 pp. $110.00 THE PUBLICATION of The First "Women in Love" must be regarded as an exciting, major event in Lawrence studies. The editors of this well-annotated addition to the already impressive and prolific cycle of definitive Cambridge editions rightly regard the revealing and early state of Women in Love as distinctly admirable in its own right—indeed, as "arguably one of his very greatest works: the only full-length work of fiction which he completed between finishing The Rainbow in the summer of 1915, and bringing the extensively revised (and rather less positive ) version of Women in Love to a close in September 1919." As John Worthen and Lindeth Vasey assert in their introduction, The First "Women in Love" remains intriguingly different from the published novel of 1920 primarily because of the pervasive tone of embattled optimism that informs crucial scenes of this earlier work. They perceptively suggest that this framework of lingering hope and sanguine resolution stands as cultural by-product as well as Lawrencean doctrine; it is related to the novel's composition amid that earlier period of the war and of modernist art and aesthetics, as his novel's clarion calls for "a new world" (quite emphatic in The First 'Women in Love") are "searingly and poignantly addressed to the England, and the Europe, of the First World 236 BOOK REVIEWS War: not to people disillusioned with society, and resigned to a world (in what was probably a 1917 revision) Gudrun and Loerke imagine torn in half by an enormous explosion." The completed version of Women in Love was published in 1920, leaving a post-war atmosphere—in the English populace as well as in Lawrence—of widespread weariness, anger, and depression. Such negative emotions progressively infiltrate Lawrence's many revisions of the novel, as well as his personal correspondence, between 1916 and 1920. Lawrence's habits of revision on the text of the completed The First 'Women in Love" range from extensive changes in many passages to complete rewriting of others, and from long sections that remain virtually untouched to minor adjustments in emphasis, phrasing, and sentence rhythm. Among the most conspicuous and consistent differences between the 1916 and the 1920 versions is that both Ursula and Gudrun appear more vulnerable and younger in the early work, and Birkin correspondingly sounds more polemical about his doctrine and less romantic about Ursula in the post-war novel. In terms of recognizable patterns in Lawrence's revision process, the editors indicate that he often concentrates on the way chapters and sequences conclude, and such a technique is implemented "sometimes just by rewriting the last sentence of what (in the 1917 revision) were being turned into chapters, sometimes by revising almost up to the chapter ending itself, sometimes by completely rewriting the whole sequence culminating in that ending." There are sixteen chapter divisions in The First "Women in Love", and the chapters lack titles. In Women in Love Lawrence divides the novel into thirty-two chapters, each with a short yet descriptive title; these smaller units of organization operate as discrete interludes...