The English novelist D.H. Lawrence was obviously conflicted about his sexuality. Effeminate men appear to have repulsed him, but like E.M. Forster and so many other men of his generation, he exhibited sexual attraction toward men of the working class. Women in Love (1920) is his most accomplished exploration of homosexual desire. Lawrence and his wife Frieda appear in the novel as Rupert Birkin and Ursula Brangwen. Rupert and Ursula's tumultuous friendships with the couple Gerald and Gudrun in the novel are based at least in part on the relationship Lawrence and his wife had with John Middleton-Murray and Katherine Mansfield. While writing the novel Lawrence also became sexually involved with a farmer from Cornwall by the name of William Henry Hocking. While Lawrence would later tell a friend, "I believe the nearest I've come to perfect love was with a coal-miner when I was about sixteen," it is his relationships with Middleton-Murray and Hocking that form the basis of the homoerotic attraction in Women in Love. The final pages of the novel, both as fiction and and as statement on sexuality, are among the most moving in literature.
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Watersgreen House is an independent international book publisher with editorial staff in the UK and USA. One of our aims at Watersgreen House is to showcase same-sex affection in works by important gay and bisexual authors in ways which were not possible at the time the books were originally published. We also publish nonfiction, including textbooks, as well as contemporary fiction that is literary, unusual, and provocative. watersgreen.wix.com/watersgreenhouse
