Sons and Lovers

David Herbert Lawrence

Penguin Books, 1989 - England - 506 pages

Torn between his passion for two women and his abiding attachment to his mother, young Paul Morel struggles with his desire to please everyone--particularly himself. Lawrence's highly autobiographical novel unfolds against the backdrop of his native Nottinghamshire coal fields, amidst a working-class family dominated by a brutish father and a loving but overbearing mother. Lushly descriptive passages range from celebrations of natural beauty and sensual pleasures to searing indictments of the social blight engendered by industrialism. Essential reading for any study of twentieth-century literature. Unabridged reprint of the classic 1913 edition. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

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SONS AND LOVERS

User Review  - Kirkus

When Sons and Lovers was first seen by its reading public in 1913, its publishers had in fact, out of caution and timidity, shortened Lawrence's originally submitted version by about ten percent—cuts ...

Review: Sons and Lovers

User Review  - Steve TK - Goodreads

This semi-autobiographical novel is important in understanding Lawrence's relationships to class, to his mother, and to love and sex. And it's a remarkably modern read, considering that it was ...

Contents

• The Early Married Life of the Morels: 35
• SONS AND LOVERS: 36
• The Birth of Paul and another Battle: 63
• INI The Casting off of Morel the Taking on of William: 83
• The Young Life of Paul: 96
• Paul Launches into Life: 124
• Death in the Family: 157
• PART: 189
• LadandGirl Love: 191
• VINI Strife in Love: 232
• 1x Defeat of Miriam: 271
• Clara: 311
• The Test on Miriam: 339
• Passion: 364
• Baxter Dames: 408
• The Release: 448
• Derelict: 481
• Notes: 493

About the author

D(avid) H(erbert) Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885. His father was a coal miner and Lawrence grew up in a mining town in England. He always hated the mines, however, and frequently used them in his writing to represent both darkness and industrialism, which he despised because he felt it was scarring the English countryside. Lawrence attended high school and college in Nottingham and, after graduation, became a school teacher in Croyden in 1908. Although his first two novels had been unsuccessful, he turned to writing full time when a serious illness forced him to stop teaching. Lawrence spent much of his adult life abroad in Europe, particularly Italy, where he wrote some of his most significant and most controversial novels, including Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterly's Lover. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, who had left her first husband and her children to live with him, spent several years touring Europe and also lived in New Mexico for a time. Lawrence had been a frail child, and he suffered much of his life from tuberculosis. Eventually, he retired to a sanitorium in Nice, France. He died in France in 1930, at age 44. In his relatively short life, he produced more than 50 volumes of short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel journals, and letters, in addition to the novels for which he is best known.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Sons and Lovers; Penguin books; Penguin classics; Penguin twentieth-century classics; The Penguin English library
• Author: David Herbert Lawrence
• Editor: Keith Sagar
• Illustrated by: David Herbert Lawrence
• Contributor: Keith Sagar
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: Penguin Books, 1989
• ISBN: 0140182152, 9780140182156
• Length: 506 pages