The First 'Women in Love' is one of Lawrence's greatest works, and is the only full length work of fiction which he completed between The Rainbow and the extensively revised Women in Love. It is a piece of fiction generated in the England, and the Europe, of the First World War. Publishers were alarmed by the fate of his previous novel The Rainbow and The First 'Women in Love' was rejected by every publisher who saw it. As a result it is a novel whose very existence as an independent text has been ignored, and which has not been published until now. The First 'Women in Love' shares much of its material with Women in Love, but its central relationships are dissimilar, and the ending radically different.