is profound. The novel ends a few weeks after Gerald's death with Birkin trying to explain to Ursula that, although he needed no other woman than Ursula, he valued a relationship with Gerald that is gone forever. Publication history After years of misunderstandings, accusations of duplicity, and hurried letters, Thomas Seltzer finally published the first edition of Women in Love in New York City, on 9 November 1920. This had come after three drawn out years of delays and revisions. This first limited edition (1,250 books) was available only to subscribers, due to the controversy caused by Lawrence's previous work, The Rainbow (1915). Originally, the two books were written as parts of a single novel, but the publisher had decided to publish them separately and in rapid succession. The first book's treatment of sexuality was frank for the mores of the time, and, after an obscenity trial, the book was banned in the UK for 11 years, although it was available in the US. The publisher then backed out of publishing the second book in the UK, so Women in Love first appeared in the US. Martin Secker published the first trade edition of Women in Love in London, on 10 June 1921. Reception As with most of Lawrence's works, Women in Loves sexual subject matter caused controversy. For example, W. Charles Pilley, an early reviewer wrote of it in John Bull, "I do not claim to be a literary critic, but I know dirt when I smell it, and here is dirt in heaps—festering, putrid heaps which smell to high Heaven." Lawrence was sued for libel by Lady Ottoline Morrell and others, who claimed their likenesses were unjustly drawn upon in The Rainbow. The book also later stirred criticism for its portrayal of love, denounced as chauvinistic and centred upon the phallus by the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949). In contrast, the critic Camille Paglia has praised Women in Love, writing in Vamps and Tramps (1994) that while she initially reacted negatively to the book, it became a "profound influence" on her as she was working on Sexual Personae (1990). Paglia compared Lawrence's novel to the poet Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590). Paglia observed that while Women in Love has "bisexual implications", she is skeptical that Lawrence would have endorsed "full sexual relations" between men. The critic Harold Bloom listed Women in Love in