Synopses & Reviews
D.H. Lawrence's great autobiographical novel is a provocative portrait of an artist torn between love for his possessive mother and desire for two young beautiful women. Set in the Nottinghamshire coal fields of Lawrence's own boyhood, the story of young Paul Morel's growing into manhood in a British working-class family rife with conflict reveals both an inner and an outer world seething with intense emotions. Gertrude is Paul's puritanical mother who concentrates all her love and attention on her son Paul. She nurtures his talents as a painter - and when she broods that he might marry someday and desert her, he swears he will never leave her. Inevitably, Paul does fall in love, but with two women - and is unable to choose between them. Written early in Lawrence's literary career, Sons and Lovers possesses all the powers of description, insistent sensuality, and scathing social criticism that are the special hallmarks of his genius. "A work of striking originality," writes the critic F.R. Leavis, by "the greatest creative writer in English of our time."
Review
“The greatest imaginative novelist of our generation.”—E. M. Forster
“He was a language, a setting, a world entirely of his own.…He was, like all true poetry, against tepid living and tepid loves…[giving] full expression to the gestures of passion.”—Anaïs Nin
Synopsis
Dark, but filled with bright genius,
Women in Love is a prophetic masterpiece steeped in eroticism, filled with perceptions about sexual power and obsession that have proven to be timeless and true.
Synopsis
Lady Chatterley's Lover is both one of the most beautiful and notorious love stories in modern fiction. The summation of D.H. Lawrence's artistic achievement, it sharply illustrates his belief that tenderness and passion were the only weapons that could save man from self-destruction.
Synopsis
D. H. Lawrence’s great autobiographical novel paints a provocative portrait of an artist torn between affection for his mother and desire for two beautiful women. Set in the Nottinghamshire coalfields of Lawrence’s own boyhood, the story follows young Paul Morel’s growth into manhood in a British working-class family.
Gertrude Morel, Paul’s puritanical mother, concentrates all her love and attention on Paul, nurturing his talents as a painter. When she muses that he might marry someday and desert her, the attentive son swears he will never leave her. Then Paul falls in love—with not one woman but two—and must eventually choose between them.…
Synopsis
Lush with imagery, this is the story of three generations of Brangwen women living during the decline of English rural life. Banned upon publication, it explores the most taboo subjects of its time: marriage, physical love, and one family's sexual mores.
Synopsis
A controversial classic from D.H. Lawrence, the author of Lady Chatterley's Lover.
Lush with religious and metaphysical imagery, this is the story of three generations of the Brangwen family, set against the decline of their rural English existence in the face of industrialization. The novel also treats the most taboo subject of its time, peering intimately into a familys sexual mores, exposing the dynamics of marriage and physical love as a sexual tug-of-war that is both formidable and inescapable. Visionary and prophetic, The Rainbow was banned in England after its publication in 1915 and was long available in the U.S. only in an expurgated edition.
With an Introduction by Daphne Merkin
About the Author
David Herbert Lawrence (18851930) was born in the mining village of Eastwood, near Nottingham, England. His father was an uneducated miner; his mother, a former schoolteacher. Lawrence began his first novel,
The White Peacock (1911), while attending Nottingham University. In 1912, he ran away with Frieda von Richthofen, the wife of one of his professors. They were married in 1914. Suffering from tuberculosis, Lawrence was in constant flight from his ill health, traveling through Europe and around the world by way of Australia and Mexico, settling for a while in Taos, New Mexico. Lawrence and Frieda returned to Europe in 1925. Among his more than forty volumes of fiction, poetry, drama, criticism, philosophy, and travel writing are
Sons and Lovers (1913),
The Rainbow (1915),
Women in Love (1920),
Studies in Classic American Literature (1923),
The Plumed Serpent (1926), and
Lady Chatterleys Lover (1928).
Daphne Merkin is an essayist, novelist and literary critic. She is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and Elle, and she writes for Slate, Book Forum, and many other publications.