Sons and Lovers: Lawrence and the Mother’s Grip

Sons and Lovers is one of the most nakedly personal novels ever written — D. H. Lawrence turning his own childhood in a mining town into art while the wounds were still open. It is the story of Paul Morel, a sensitive boy in a brutal industrial world, and of the mother whose fierce love is both his salvation and the thing that cripples him for every other woman he will meet.

Lawrence wrote it a few years after Freud, and it has become the classic literary case of the mother-son bond that will not let go. Mrs Morel, married to a coarse husband she despises, pours all her thwarted passion into her sons; and Paul, so loved, finds he cannot give himself fully to Miriam or to Clara, because his mother has already claimed the deepest part of him. ‘I’ll never meet the right woman while you live,’ he tells her — and means it.

What lifts it above case study is the writing: Lawrence’s astonishing feel for the physical world, the pull of bodies and flowers and the pit, the way desire and tenderness and resentment move through a family like weather. No one has written the working-class home from the inside with more truth.

Read it beside our other novels of the English provinces, from Hardy’s Wessex onward.

Read Sons and Lovers — the Erato Press edition →