Two decades after his first great triumph at the cinema, Ken Russell returned to the well with his second D.H. Lawrence adaptation, turning out a prequel to his own Women in Love in the process. Whereas that film’s story was shared between sisters Ursula and Gudrun, this one is focused on Ursula the elder, played by Sammi Davis (fresh off Russell’s The Lair of the White Worm, made the previous year), as she attempts to forge her own identity.
For the headstrong and at times immature Ursula, this involves taking private swimming lessons from her school’s new athletics mistress (Amanda Donohoe, also from Lair), disapproving of her coal baron uncle (David Hemmings), fending off a lecherous painter (Dudley Sutton), taking a teaching position in London (where she finds keeping her students in line a challenge even with the example of Jim Carter’s strict headmaster), and losing her virginity to a soldier (Paul McGann, the “I” in Withnail & I) on the eve of his departure for the Boer War. And providing a link to the first film is the casting of Glenda Jackson (the original Gudrun) as their mother and Russell regular Christopher Gable as their father.
