Book 31: Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence(100 Great Books) + Career Transition Principles with Consultant Turned Novelist Santanu Bhattacharya

Great books, food for thought, and ideas for a meaningful future

Thanks for all your questions, feedback, and insights on my article published by The New Indian Express last week. Yes, Dr. Anamika is my mother. You can read the article and the book at your leisure.

This week, I interviewed Santanu Bhattacharya, a management consultant turned award-winning novelist. Check out the episode to learn how he nurtured his love for writing while having a full-time job, how he cracked the opaque publishing market in the UK, and what led him to quit his job.

These are challenging times for many people, but the quote below puts things in perspective.

“The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness.”— Alain de Botton

Women in Love: D.H. Lawrence

England in 1913 was a country vibrating at a frequency it could barely sustain. The industrial north churned out coal and steel and a particular kind of human being: hollowed by labour, shaped by machinery, estranged from the land and from himself. The old class structures held, just barely, like ice in March. Meanwhile, Freud had begun publishing, the suffragettes were in the streets, and a generation of young artists sensed that the Victorian moral framework had become a cage dressed up as a cathedral.

Into this charged atmosphere came D.H. Lawrence, a coal miner’s son from Nottinghamshire who had climbed out of the working class through sheer intellectual ferocity. He was slender, red-bearded, frequently ill with tuberculosis, and burning with a kind of visionary intensity that unnerved almost everyone he met. He had already published Sons and Lovers in 1913, a largely autobiographical novel about the suffocating pull of maternal love, and The Rainbow in 1915, which was seized by the police and declared obscene. Women in Love, written alongside The Rainbow as a kind of twin volume, would take another five years to find a publisher, eventually appearing in 1920 in a private edition in New York.

Lawrence wrote it during the First World War, a fact that saturates every page. He watched the war from a distance, barred from service by his health, and what he saw confirmed his darkest suspicions: that Western civilisation had arrived at a point of terminal self-destruction, that the rational, industrial, democratic project had produced a culture capable of sending millions of men into the mud to die for abstractions. Women in Love is his reckoning with that horror. It is a love story set at the edge of an abyss.