Sons and Lovers
Language: English
20th Century Autobiographical fiction British Classics Coming of Age Criticism Domestic fiction English European Family Fiction Historical Irish Literature Psychology Romance Scottish Welsh Young men
Publisher: Barnes & Noble
Published: Jan 1, 1913
Description:
Sons and Lovers , by D. H. Lawrence , is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each readers understanding of these enduring works. Called the most widely-read English novel of the twentieth century, D. H. Lawrence ’s largely autobiographical Sons and Lovers tells the story of Paul Morel, a young artist growing into manhood in a British working-class community near the Nottingham coalfields. His mother Gertrude, unhappily married to Paul’s hard-drinking father, devotes all her energies to her son. They develop a powerful and passionate relationship, but eventually tensions arise when Paul falls in love with a girl and seeks to escape his family ties. Torn between his desire for independence and his abiding attachment to his loving but overbearing mother, Paul struggles to define himself sexually and emotionally through his relationships with two women—the innocent, old-fashioned Miriam Leivers, and the experienced, provocatively modern Clara Dawes.
Heralding Lawrence’s mature period, Sons and Lovers vividly evokes the all-consuming nature of possessive love and sexual attraction. Lushly descriptive and deeply emotional, it is rich in universal truths about human relationships.
Victoria Blake is a freelance writer. She has worked at The Paris Review and contributed to the Boulder Daily Camera , small literary presses in the United States, and English-language publications in Bangkok, Thailand. She currently lives and works in San Diego, California.
Sons and Lovers is one of the landmark novels of the twentieth century. When it appeared 1913 it was immediately recognized as the first great modern restatement of the oedipal drama, and it is now widely considered the major work of D. H. Lawrence's early period. The semi-autobiographical novel forced immediate acclaim to D. H. Lawrence and became a portent of all the powerful and ecstatic novels that were later to come from his pen. Its intensity of feeling does not diminish with the passage of time and today it still holds, for that reason, its great popularity with a new generation of readers.
D. H. Lawrence's passionate third published novel, taken by many to be his earliest masterpiece, is the story of artist Paul Morel as a young man, his powerful relationship with his possessive mother, his passionate love affair with Miriam Leivers, his intense liaison with married Clara Dawes. It recounts the story of Morel, a young artist growing to manhood in a British working-class family rife with conflict and the author's vivid evocation of the all-consuming nature of possessive love and sexual attraction. Here, too, England's Derbyshire springs to life with both is sooty mining villages and deep green pastures, a setting as full of contrasts as the deep emotions that rule this remarkable book. Included are poems about the tie to the mother, about Miriam, about the trauma of the mother's lingering mortal illness, and about the poignant aftermath of her death during which the son suffered self-abandonment to grief and a sense of desolation described in the novel as a nuit blanche or 'white night.' Sons and Lovers is rich with universal truths about relationships.