ABSTRACT
This chapter compares D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love to Lev Tolstoi's Anna Karenina. Lawrence not only generalized about humanity as a whole, but also about such groups as women, men, people of Arctic tendency, people of African tendency, the race-old, the race-young, Australians, Etruscans, Russians, and Jews. The task of comparing Women in Love to Anna Karenina must take account of the fact that Lawrence was constructing a comparison. Like Tolstoi's comparison of Levin and Anna, this is acknowledged at the level of detail. Several of his works contain two contrasting protagonists — often sisters, who are comparable by virtue of being of the same sex, the products of similar nurture, and often seen together. Lawrence uses Gerald Crich's mode of death in part as an attack on the myth of Scott, on his own country, on the First World War, and on barren tragedy; the first of these constitutes another possible reason for its rejection by publishers.
