Wow. What a tragic book. I found I didn't really like any of the selfish, dramatic characters. Everything seemed so big and life-altering to them, and they couldn't ever seem to settle down or accept anything that would make them happy into their lives. How frustrating to read! I felt like I wanted to slap some sense into most of the women in the book - I wonder how I'll feel when I read Women In Love. I just couldn't identify (for the most part), and I certainly couldn't sympathize. The girls of each generation just kept flailing at something they couldn't even identify, instead of trying to make peace with what they had and where they were. I did like the feminist aspects of the book, though, and I truly enjoyed how liberal-minded Lawrence seemed to be, his progressive take on women in many ways. But at the same time I felt like he was very misogynistic, that he believed that women were fickle, flighty creatures prone to dramatic scenes at every turn, and unable to find their place in life. Perhaps it was a commentary on the changing world that they found themselves in, with the collieries gradually eating up more and more of the traditional farmland landscape. I suppose I can understand the metaphors which Lawrence was trying to paint, and the frustration he and his characters might have felt. And I can't decide if I feel as if Lawrence was a feminist or just a jerk. He seems to leave Ursula with a new-found hope, where she believes she can get through on her own terms. But I find Lawrence's intentions in writing this book difficult to discern. Hrm.

Oh, and I found myself extremely frustrated with the difficulty of getting through some of the passages where one character or another just devolves into a mess of very repetitive stream-of-consciousness type thought. I would drag my feet through these, hence the month it took me to read the book. It reminded me of when Henry Miller would digress in Tropic of Cancer into this long-winded, unnecessary passage which I just couldn't even get myself to focus on, and would have to read 8 times before I could grasp the point. I enjoyed the story of both books, and even most of the philosophy they were trying to feed the reader, but I just couldn't abide those parts where things just spiraled down into a mess of unnecessary self-indulgence.