Sons and Lovers
1913
The novel that scandalized its era and redefined what fiction could reach. Paul Morel is the son of a coal-miner whose marriage to his refined wife has curdled into resentment and silence. But Gertrude Morel has found her outlet: her sons, particularly Paul, will carry everything she never achieved, every tenderness her husband denied her. The result is a bond so fierce it becomes a kind of possession. Lawrence traces how this smothering love poisons Paul's attempts at genuine connection. With Miriam, the gentle girl who adores him, he cannot fully surrender his mother still lives in his head, whispering judgment. With Clara, a married woman hungry for freedom, he finds only another entanglement. Set in the grim beauty of Nottinghamshire's mining country, Sons and Lovers pulses with working-class life: the pub, the pit, the mean streets. But Lawrence's true subject is the unconscious itself, the way desire and loyalty destroy each other, and how the people we love most can become the chains that bind us. It remains one of the most psychologically devastating novels ever written about what families do to each other in the name of love.
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“Recklessness is almost a man's revenge on his woman. He feels he is not valued so he will risk destroying himself to deprive her altogether.””
— D. H. Lawrence
“Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved. The warmth, the security and peace of soul, the utter comfort from the touch of the other, knits the sleep, so that it takes the body and soul completely in its healing.””
— D. H. Lawrence
“She had borne so long this cruelty of belonging to him and not being claimed by him.””
— D. H. Lawrence
“And in this passion for understanding her soul lay close to his; she had him all to herself. But he must be made abstract first.””
— D. H. Lawrence
“They wanted genuine intimacy, but they could not get even normally near to anyone, because they scorned to take the first steps, they scorned the triviality which forms common human intercourse.””
— D. H. Lawrence
“Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spiraling round for terror, and holding each other in embrace, there in a darkness that outpassed them all, and left them tiny and daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core of nothingness, and yet not nothing.””
— D. H. Lawrence
“You're always begging things to love you," he said, "as if you were a beggar for love. Even the flowers, you have to fawn on them--””
— D. H. Lawrence
“He always ran away from the battle with himself. Even in his own heart's privacy, he excused himself, saying, "If she hadn't said so-and-so, it would never have happened.””
— D. H. Lawrence
“...you love me so much, you want to put me in your pocket. And there I will die smothered.””
— D. H. Lawrence
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Lawrence, D. H.. Sons and Lovers. Lex, lex-books.com/book/sons-and-lovers-2488f5aa-5430-4379-8c7e-93bc120e3840.Lawrence, D. H. (1913). Sons and Lovers. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/sons-and-lovers-2488f5aa-5430-4379-8c7e-93bc120e3840Lawrence, D. H.. Sons and Lovers. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/sons-and-lovers-2488f5aa-5430-4379-8c7e-93bc120e3840.
