Ursula Brangwen and ‘The Essential Criticism’: The Female Corrective in Women in Love

Abstract

Critics have not been generous to the Ursula of Women in Love. Characteristic reactions include the harsh and ideological dismissal of her by Kate Millett and Carolyn Heilbrun, who view her, respectively, as ‘Birkin’s wife and echo … an incomplete creature … the epitome of passivity’,¹ and as merely the ‘satellite to Birkin’s star’.² Such a common misreading by feminists of Ursula’s role is surprising given their frequent calls for woman’s active sexual partnership in marriage; for such is the status that a persistent Ursula both encourages and achieves with her head¬strong and often contradictory husband. There are also the more sober disappointments of consensus Lawrence criticism, which still encourages an approach to the novel that either virtually ignores Ursula or bemoans a purported submissiveness in her relationship with Birkin. Only in some undeveloped remarks by, among others, F. R. Leavis, Frank Kermode, Julian Moynahan, and Charles Ross, is there a significant implication that her function in the work and her attachment to Birkin are other than subsidiary or tangential; even their acknowledgements of her resistance to Birkin’s doctrines do not suggest that she provides any compelling counterpoint, any ethos of her own to offer against her lover’s more didactic exhortations.³

‘But why do you always grip your lips?’ he asked, regretful.

‘Never mind,’ she said swiftly. ‘It is my way.’