First encountered in Lawrence's novel The Rainbow, sisters Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen are now grown-up women living in the English Midlands at the time of the First World War. Each becomes involved in a love affair: Ursula with the misanthropic intellectual Rupert Birkin, and Gudrun with Gerald Crich, a successful industrialist. The contrast between the two relationships – the former happy and fulfilling, the latter tempestuous and violent – facilitates an examination of both the regenerative and destructive aspects of human passion, while the novel's Alpine climax is revelatory of the intensity of close male friendship.

Heavily revised by the author in an attempt to avoid a repeat of the controversy surrounding the publication of The Rainbow, which had been suppressed on grounds of obscenity, Women in Love appeared first in the US in 1920, with a British edition following the next year. Straddling the boundary between nineteenth-century realism and modernism, it was regarded by Lawrence as his most accomplished work, and is considered by many to be the author's masterpiece.