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Sons and Lovers
D. H. Lawrence
*Sons and Lovers* is the novel where D. H. Lawrence turned his own upbringing into art, and it remains one of the finest coming-of-age stories in English. Published in 1913, it follows Paul Morel, a coal-miner's son in the English Midlands, torn between an overbearing love for his mother and his attempts to build a life and loves of his own. Lawrence writes the industrial working class from the inside, with a physical intensity and psychological candor that felt new—Freud's ideas hang in the air, though Lawrence came to them his own way. The book can be raw and uneven, but its emotional truth is overwhelming. For readers wanting to understand why Lawrence mattered, or simply after a deeply felt portrait of family, class, and first love, this is the essential place to start.
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The author
D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) was the son of a Nottinghamshire coal miner and a schoolteacher mother, a background that saturates his early fiction. He became one of the most original and combative English novelists of the modern era, forever probing sex, class, and the life of the body.
The book
Sons and Lovers, published in 1913, is his third novel and his most openly autobiographical. Through Paul Morel it dramatizes a son's suffocating closeness to his mother and its cost to his relationships with two very different women, set against the grit of a mining community.
How it has aged
It endures as a classic of English realism and remains widely taught. Modern readers sometimes resist its intensity and its treatment of the women characters, but the emotional force and the vividness of the working-class world are undiminished.
For more context
The novel is often read alongside Freudian ideas of the Oedipus complex, though Lawrence developed his own vocabulary of instinct and 'blood-consciousness' rather than borrowing the theory wholesale.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- D. H. Lawrence
- Year
- 1913
- ISBN
- None
- Format
- Hardcover
- Shelf
- Fiction
- Location
- Maine
Green library binding set