Sons and Lovers
Paul Morel grows up in a Nottinghamshire mining family where his mother's disappointed love becomes the gravitational center of the household. Lawrence traces Paul's attempts to love other women—Miriam, the farmhouse intellectual, and Clara, the married suffragette—against the pull of a bond that no romance can match or survive.Bantam Classics reissues the novel as standard reading, which it is, though the emotions remain unruly. The book's reputation for frankness has faded; what remains is a portrait of working-class life rendered with the urgency of someone who knows that education and ambition can separate a person from his origins without delivering him anywhere in particular. For readers who have loved the wrong person for the right reasons and are not yet done examining why.
