Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their father's house in Beldover, working and talking. Ursula was stitching a piece of brightly-colored embroidery, and Gudrun was drawing upon a board which she held on her knee. They were mostly silent, talking as their thoughts strayed through their minds. "Ursula," said Gudrun, "don't you _really want_ to get married?" Ursula laid her embroidery in her lap and looked up. Her face was calm and considerate. -- "I don't know," she replied. "It depends how you mean." Gudrun was slightly taken aback. She watched her sister for some moments. -- "Well," she said, ironically, "it usually means one thing! But don't you think anyhow, you'd be --" she darkened slightly -- "in a better position than you are in now." A shadow came over Ursula's face. -- "I might," she said.

Author Biography

David Herbert Richards "D. H." Lawrence (1885 - 1930) was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter. His collected works represent, among other things, an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialization. Some of the issues Lawrence explores are emotional health, vitality, spontaneity and instinct. Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile which he called his "savage pilgrimage." At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as, "The greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later, the Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel.