Sons and Lovers

A story of maternal love and sexual passion, Sons and Lovers tells of Gertrude Morel, eager to love but swift to realise the mistake she has made in marrying Walter, a miner. As Walter spends more and more time drinking in the pub to avoid fighting with his wife, Gertrude must instead turn her capacity for love onto her sons, William and Paul - but her attentions, rather than encouraging her sons, begin to suffocate them. Only Paul can make the choice: between his own romantic partners, or the obsessive need of his mother.

Sons and Lovers is D. H. Lawrence's searingly autobiographical portrayal of childhood, adolescence and the effects of a dysfunctional family.

About the Author

D. H. Lawrence was born in 1885 into a poor working class family in a coal mining village in Nottinghamshire. The fourth child of a schoolmistress and little-educated miner, his working class upbringing, fraught relationship with his father and very close bond with his mother informed the semi-autobiographical Sons and Lovers. Lawrence started his career teaching, and it was Ford Madox Ford who first noticed Lawrence's talent when he saw some of his poetry in 1908. He went on to become a prolific novelist, playwright, essayist and literary critic as well as poet, and spent the majority of his life travelling in a sort of self-imposed exile, through places as diverse as Australia, Italy, New Mexico, Bavaria and Sri Lanka. He died in 1930 in Vence, France, of tuberculosis.