LoveReading Says
LoveReading Says
Set in Lawrence’s native Nottinghamshire, Sons and Lovers is a highly autobiographical and compelling portrayal of childhood, adolescence and the clash of generations. The marriage of Gertrude and Walter Morel has become a battleground. Repelled by her vulgar, choleric and sometimes violent drinker of a husband, delicate Gertrude devotes her life to her children, especially to her sons, William and Paul - determined they will not follow their father down the coal mines. Conflict is evitable when Paul seeks to escape his mother's suffocating grasp through relationships with women his own age but he is so emotionally bound to his mother that he has a difficult time of it.
As Philip Larkin is reported to have written, aged 19 “I have been reading ‘Sons and Lovers’ and feel ready to die. If Lawrence had been killed after writing that book he’d still be England’s greatest novelist.” This book will rekindle your love for classic literature or ignite it for the first time if it hasn’t developed yet. It’s a beautifully tender and engrossing portrayal of familial love, sexual love and romantic love and all of their complexities. I adore it.
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Sons and Lovers Synopsis
Lawrence's first major novel was also the first in the English language to explore ordinary working-class life from the inside. No writer before or since has written so well about the intimacies enforced by a tightly-knit mining community and by a family where feelings are never hidden for long.
When the marriage between Walter Morel and his sensitive, high-minded wife begins to break down, the bitterness of their frustration seeps into their children's lives. Their second son, Paul, craves the warmth of family and community, but knows that he must sacrifice everything in the struggle for independence if he is not to repeat his parents' failure.
Lawrence's powerful description of Paul's single-minded efforts to define himself sexually and emotionally through relationships with two women - the innocent, old-fashioned Miriam Leivers and the experienced, provocatively modern Clara Dawes - makes this a novel as much for the beginning of the twenty-first century as it was for the beginning of the twentieth.
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About D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Lawrence was born into a miner’s family in
Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, in 1885, the fourth of five children. He
attended Beauvale Board School and Nottingham High School, and trained
as an elementary schoolteacher at Nottingham University College. He
taught in Croydon from 1908. His first novel, The White Peacock,
was published in 1911, just a few weeks after the death of his mother to
whom he had been extraordinarily close. His career as a schoolteacher
was ended by serious illness at the end of 1911.
In 1912 Lawrence
went to Germany with Frieda Weekley, the German wife of the Professor
of Modern Languages at the University College of Nottingham. They were
married on their return to England in 1914. Lawrence had published Sons and Lovers in 1913; but The Rainbow, completed in 1915, was suppressed, and for three years he could not find a publisher for Women in Love, completed in 1917.
After
the war, Lawrence lived abroad, and sought a more fulfilling mode of
life than he had so far experienced. With Frieda, he lived in Sicily,
Sri Lanka, Australia, New Mexico and Mexico. They returned to Europe in
1925. His last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, was published in
1928 but was banned in England and America. In 1930 he died in Vence, in
the south of France, at the age of forty-four.
Lawrence’s life
may have been short, but he lived it intensely. He also produced an
amazing body of work; novels, stories, poems, plays, essays, travel
books, translations, paintings and letters (over five thousand of which
survive). After his death Frieda wrote that, ‘What he had seen and felt
and known he gave in his writing to his fellow men, the splendour of
living, the hope of more and more life … a heroic and immeasureable
gift.’
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