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Title:
Sons and Lovers
Author: D. H. Lawrence
First Published in: 1913
Walter Morel has married a sensitive and high-minded woman
better educated than himself. She begins to shrink from his
lack of fine feelings and drunkenness. Morel, baffeled and
thwarted, is sometimes violent, while Mrs. Morel turns all
her love towards her four children, particulary her two eldest
sons, William and Paul. She struggles to keep herself and her
family respectable and is determined that her boys will
not become miners. William goes to London to work as a
clerk, and Paul also gets a job as a clerk with Mr
Jordan, manufacturer of surgical appliances; William
develops pneumonia and dies. Mrs Morel, numbed by
despair, is roused only when Paul also falls ill. She
nurses him back to health, and subsequently their
attachment deepens. Paul is friendly with the Leivers
family of Willey Farm, and a tenderness grows between him
and the daughter Miriam, a soulful, shy girl. Mrs Morel
fears that Miriam will exclude her and tries to break up
their relationship, while Paul, himself sickenened at
heart by Miriam's romantic love and fear of physical
warmth. tums away and becomes involved with Clara Dawes,
a married woman, separated from her husband Baxter, and a
sup porter of Women's Rights. Paul is made an overseer at
the factory and he now begins to noticed as a painter and
designer. Clara returns to her husband. Meanwhile Mrs
Morel is ill with cancer. At last, unable to bear her
suffering, Paul and his sister Annie put an overdose of
morphia in her milk. Paul resists the urge to follow her
'into the darkness' and, with a great effort, turns
towards life. Sons and Lovers was perhaps first English
novel with a truly working-class background.
Text file provided by:
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