Antipathies to the clock Gudrun Brangwen expresses are as vehement as any in English literature. Extending over several pages in Women in Love (1921), they suggest that ‘bondage’ to measured time gripped the society D. H. Lawrence portrays still more strongly than it had the world Joseph Conrad describes in The Secret Agent (1907). Factors contributing to this tightening grip – hardening the influence of those considered in the previous two chapters – can be traced throughout the writing Lawrence began in 1913, variously entitled ‘The Sisters’ or ‘The Wedding Ring’. This was eventually divided into two long novels: The Rainbow (1915), following several generations of the Brangwen family in the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth, and the work Lawrence considered ‘more or less a sequel’, Women in Love, set in the troubled years around the Great War. Analysis of this extended fictional history, and of differences in mood and structure between the two novels, helps suggest why ‘the terrible clock’ had come to seem so threatening by the time Women in Love was published – on the threshold of the 1920s, modernism's major decade.

Circle and Line

Early pages of The Rainbow record how the Brangwen family ‘had lived for generations on the Marsh Farm’: on ‘horizontal land’ in Nottinghamshire, beneath an ‘empty sky’ whose horizon is broken only by the distant church tower of a country town. Life for the family has long remained almost as featureless temporally as it is topographically, changing only through the kind of ‘age old rhythms’ or eternal circles considered in chapters 1 and 2 – natural, annual cycles of ‘earth and sky and beast and green plants’.