Sons and Lovers

Description

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.

David Herbert Lawrence was born 11 September 1885 in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire. His father was a miner and his mother was a schoolteacher. In 1906 he took up a scholarship at Nottingham University to study to be a teacher. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1911. Lawrence gave up teaching in 1911 due to illness. In 1912 he met and fell in love with a married woman, Frieda Weekley, and they eloped to Germany together. They were married in 1914 and spent the rest of their lives together travelling around the world. In 1915 Lawrence published The Rainbow which was banned in Great Britain for obscenity. Women in Love continues the story of the Brangwen family begun in The Rainbow and was finished by Lawrence in 1916 but not published until 1920. Another of Lawrence's most famous works, Lady Chatterley's Lover, was privately printed in Florence in 1928 but was not published in Britain until 1960, when it was the subject of an unsuccessful court case brought against it for obscenity. As well as novels, Lawrence also wrote in a variety of other genres and his poetry, criticism and travel books remain highly regarded. He was also a keen painter. D.H. Lawrence died in France on 2 March 1930.