Sons and Lovers

The Penguin English Library Edition of Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence'"She was a brazen hussy.""She wasn't. - And she was pretty, wasn't she?""I didn't look ... And tell your girls, my son, that when they're running after you, they're not to come and ask your mother for you - tell them that - brazen baggages you meet at dancing classes"'The marriage of Gertrude and Walter Morel has become a battleground. Repelled by her uneducated and sometimes violent husband, delicate Gertrude devotes her life to her children, especially to her sons, William and Paul - determined they will not follow their father into working down the coal mines. But conflict is evitable when Paul seeks to escape his mother's suffocating grasp through relationships with women his own age. Set in Lawrence's native Nottinghamshire, Sons and Lovers is a highly autobiographical and compelling portrayal of childhood, adolescence and the clash of generations.The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

D. H. Lawrence was born in 1885 into a poor working-class family in a coal mining village in Nottinghamshire. The fourth child of a schoolmistress and little-educated miner, his working class upbringing, fraught relationship with his father and very close bond with his mother informed the semi-autobiographical Sons and Lovers. Lawrence started his career teaching, and it was Ford Madox Ford who first noticed Lawrence's talent when he saw some of his poetry in 1908. He went on to become a prolific novelist, playwright, essayist and literary critic as well as poet, and spent the majority of his life travelling in a sort of self-imposed exile, through places as diverse as Australia, Italy, New Mexico, Bavaria and Sri Lanka. He died in 1930 in Vence, France, of tuberculosis.