Sons and Lovers

The Mining Village and the Artistic Soul

D.H. Lawrence was born in 1885 in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, the son of a coal miner and a former schoolteacher who had married beneath herself and spent much of her married life resenting it. Sons and Lovers, published in 1913, is the most direct fictional account of that world and that family he ever wrote — a bildungsroman whose autobiographical roots are visible on every page, but which transforms personal experience into something of universal resonance.

The novel’s first section deals with the marriage of Walter and Gertrude Morel: a marriage that was, at its start, passionate and physically alive, and that deteriorated into bitterness as Walter retreated into the pub and Gertrude transferred her emotional ambitions to her children — first William, who goes to London and dies of the effort of living between two worlds, and then Paul, the painter and the novel’s central figure. Lawrence’s portrait of the Morel marriage is one of his most complex achievements: Walter is not a villain but a man diminished by circumstances, and Gertrude is not a saint but a woman whose considerable intelligence and energy have been frustrated into a form of love that is also a form of possession.

Paul Morel grows up in the particular environment that Lawrence knew intimately: the colliery landscape of the East Midlands, the terraced houses, the Sunday School teas, the pit-head against the sky, the specific textures of working-class life in an industrial town in the 1890s and 1900s. This is the first great working-class bildungsroman in English, and what distinguishes it from subsequent examples of the form is Lawrence’s refusal to sentimentalize either the world Paul comes from or the world he aspires to enter. Both have costs; neither fully fits him.

The Tyranny of Love

The novel’s psychological core is its account of the damage that Gertrude’s love does to her sons. The argument — which Lawrence was making before Freud’s theories had penetrated popular consciousness in England — is that a mother’s excessive investment in her son, born from the disappointment of her marriage, creates a bond that makes the son incapable of full adult love for anyone else. Paul’s relationships with Miriam Leivers and Clara Dawes are both failures, and Lawrence traces those failures to the same source: Paul cannot give himself fully to either woman because he is already given, at the deepest level, to his mother.

Miriam is the first serious love — spiritual, intense, literary, and frustrating to Paul because she seems to him to love the soul while refusing the body. Clara is the counter: physical, frank, liberating in a different way and equally insufficient. Lawrence distinguishes between these relationships with a care that repays close attention: what Paul wants from Miriam is different from what he wants from Clara, and both are different from what he has with his mother, and none of these triangulations resolves the underlying problem.

The novel ends with Gertrude’s death — a death Paul assists with an overdose of morphine dissolved in her milk — and Paul alone, the bonds that held him beginning to dissolve, turning “towards the city’s gold phosphorescence” rather than retreating into the darkness. Whether this ending is hopeful or merely unresolved is a question Lawrence leaves deliberately open, and in its openness it is more honest than a conventional conclusion would have been.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — The first great working-class English novel, and still the most psychologically penetrating account of family love as a form of captivity.