D.H. Lawrence's masterpiece charts the fluctuations in the relationships of Ursula Brangwen and her sister Gudrun with their lovers Rupert Birkin, in many ways a self-portrait, and Gerald, the son of an industrial magnate. In his intense friendship Gerald and his marriage to Ursula, Birkin seeks out new kinds of relationships, attempting to transcend the destructive twentieth-century conjunction of love and death and its mechanical, soulless sexuality.