Life & Wisdom Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence turns a sexual paradox into a moral provocation: the “free woman” is both the one who “never gives herself” and the one “always giving herself.” The line works because “give” is doing double duty. On the surface it’s erotic generosity; underneath it’s a question of ownership. To “give yourself” can mean surrender, the handing over of agency, the signing away of an inner life. Lawrence’s trick is to separate availability from submission: the woman who is perpetually open to experience may be the least likely to be possessed by anyone’s story about her.

That tension is pure Lawrence-era anxiety. In the early 20th century, “free woman” is a loaded label, tied to the “New Woman,” loosening Victorian sexual codes, and male panic about women becoming unclassifiable: not wife, not fallen, not reliably legible. Lawrence often writes as if modern life has drained intimacy of its seriousness, yet he’s also fascinated by women who refuse to be domesticated into a role. This sentence both admires and polices that refusal. “Always giving” can sound like celebration of liberated desire; it can also carry the faint accusation of promiscuity, the old suspicion that freedom is just indiscriminate self-dispensing.

The subtext is a tug-of-war over what counts as real intimacy. Lawrence insists the self is not a commodity to be transferred, even in sex, even in love. The free woman’s power is that she can offer her body, attention, even affection without turning her autonomy into a dowry. That’s the sting: the more she gives, the less anyone can claim she has been “given.”