Sons and Lovers is considered to be D.H. Lawrence’s first mature novel. What is unique about this novel is its profound psychological insights into the complex relationships between son and mother and between son and other women.
Novel is largely autobiographical and reflects Lawrence’s life at Nottinghamshire coalfields before he left home. This is perhaps the first English novel with a truly working-class background. It is a provocative portrait of an artist torn between love for his possessive mother and desire for two young beautiful women. Gertrude is Paul’s puritanical mother who concentrates all her love and attention on her son Paul. She nurtures his talents as a painter. When she ponders that he might marry some day and desert her, he swears that he will never leave her. Paul falls in love with two women and is unable to choose between them. The novel begins like a nineteenth century realistic novel but ends as a twentieth century novel exploring a new field of psychic relationships.
David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) was born at Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, fourth of the five children of a coal-miner and an ex-school teacher. He attended Nottingham High School and Nottingham University College. He grew up in considerable poverty. Emotional friction between the parents, and Lawrence’s close relationship with his mother, left important traces in his later writing. He was subject to illness, including lung infections, from a very early age and poor health dogged him throughout his life, culminating in his death from tuberculosis at the age of forty-four.
After leaving school in 1901 Lawrence became a junior clerk in a surgical appliance factory for a brief period. From 1902 to 1906 he worked as a pupil teacher, at Eastwood and then at Ilkeston, saving the money necessary to take a training course at University College. He matriculated at the age of twenty-two and joined the staff of Davidson Road School in Croydon, an important move towards emotional and financial independence and the prelude to his literary career.
His first novel, The White Peacock (1911) was followed by The Trespasser (1912). After the death of his mother to whom he had been abnormally close, he became seriously ill and gave up teaching. Sons and Lovers (1913) is a faithful autobiographical account of these early years. In 1912, he met Frieda Weekley, daughter of a German baron and wife of his old Professor at Nottingham; she was six years older than Lawrence and mother of three children. They fell in love and eloped to Germany. Their life was passionate and stormy; they married after Frieda’s divorce in 1914.
During World War I the Lawrences at first lived in London, then moved to Cornwall. They developed close friendship with many of the literary figures of the period like David Garnett, Aldous Huxley, Betrand Russel, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Katherine Mansfield, John Middleton Murry and Richard Aldington. The Rainbow (1915), considered by many critics to be his best novel, was prosecuted by the authorities and banned on grounds of obscenity. Further harassment followed when the Lawrences were accused of spying for the Germans and were officially expelled from Cornwall in October 1917. He had completed another novel, Women in Love, but was not able to find a publisher. Lawrence’s last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, was banned in 1928 and his paintings confiscated in 1929. He died in Vence in 1930 at the age of forty-four. During his life he had produced more than forty volumes of fiction, poetry, drama, criticism, philosophy and travel writing.
