Sons and Lovers — D.H. Lawrence

Sons and Lovers is one of the landmark novels of the twentieth century. When it appeared 1913 it was immediately recognized as the first great modern restatement of the oedipal drama, and it is now widely considered the major work of D. H. Lawrence's early period. The semi-autobiographical novel forced immediate acclaim to D. H. Lawrence and became a portent of all the powerful and ecstatic novels that were later to come from his pen. Its intensity of feeling does not diminish with the passage of time and today it still holds, for that reason, its great popularity with a new generation of readers.

D. H. Lawrence's passionate third published novel, taken by many to be his earliest masterpiece, is the story of artist Paul Morel as a young man, his powerful relationship with his possessive mother, his passionate love affair with Miriam Leivers, his intense liaison with married Clara Dawes. It recounts the story of Morel, a young artist growing to manhood in a British working-class family rife with conflict and the author's vivid evocation of the all-consuming nature of possessive love and sexual attraction. Here, too, England's Derbyshire springs to life with both is sooty mining villages and deep green pastures, a setting as full of contrasts as the deep emotions that rule this remarkable book. Included are poems about the tie to the mother, about Miriam, about the trauma of the mother's lingering mortal illness, and about the poignant aftermath of her death during which the son suffered self-abandonment to grief and a sense of desolation described in the novel as a nuit blanche or 'white night.' Sons and Lovers is rich with universal truths about relationships.