

Loading... Sons and Lovers (1913)by D. H. Lawrence
![]() None. » 44 more BBC Big Read (112) 1910s (8) 20th Century Literature (146) Unread books (141) Favourite Books (543) Modernism (21) Books Read in 2015 (671) United Kingdom (49) 100 World Classics (71) My favourite books (59) Review 4 (6) The Greatest Books (92) Best family sagas (223) Banned Books Week 2014 (178) Five star books (751) Best of World Literature (343) Disappointing. ( ![]() I am more of a Sci-Fi reader so this was a new experience for me when I read it. There are some books where narratives don't seem like words, and you actually are pushed into the author's reality. For a new reader, this is one book which challenges the conventions and pushes the boundaries of relationships. It feels so surreal yet so true. And the passion with which Lawrence pens those words is as if he is directly narrating the book inside your head. A remarkable piece of writing. What a wonderful book! Really, really great - written beautifully, with a simple but at the same time complex storyline. The story itself, though spread over so many years, didn't have a lot of action, but in terms of themes & revelations I thought it was incredibly compelling. The ending was very sad, & I liked that it didn't come to the conclusion I thought it would. For the time it was written its surprising how racy it is, & how relevant a lot of it still is. I did feel it was a shame that for all their prominence in the story & in Paul's life, the women involved all seem quite weak both in terms of character development & in terms of themselves when it comes to Paul. Even though one is a suffragette, another quite independent & all fairly strong, they are still rendered second to the main, and at times quite dislikeable, character. A love marriage between Gertrude Coppard of slightly better family than Walter Morel, a coalminer, in Nottinghamshire, produces four children. William, Paul, Annie, and Arthur. The novel is in part a portrait of a marriage and a family wherein one person is ambitious and the other is not. The novel focuses on two of the four children, William and Paul. William, the eldest is smart and handsome, but proves to have a similar weakness as his mother. Her attentions shift to Paul who has artistic ability and temperament and for the first three decades of his life (which are all we get) his affections are divided between his mother and two very different women. For its time the book was "advanced" even shockingly open about sexual desire. Lawrence's turf is the inner self, the turmoil of emotions, instincts, and impulses that appear to govern much of human behavior. It is only with great effort and thought that a person can break even partially free of being entirely subject to those aspects of the self, free to make his or her own choices about how to live and who to be. With the two women Paul struggles to disentangle his sexual desires from whether he likes and respects them. With his mother he has a different struggle--to be loyal and loving to her without being dominated by her. Clara, his second lover, has herself struggled to define herself through the women's movement and this attracts and repels Paul. His ambivalence toward her, his need to conquer, but his honesty with her that his ideas of what men assume and women endure interested me more than anything else. The writing--Lawrence's simplified and strange lush rushing repetitive sentences studded with obscure local words is as original as ever and perfectly suits what he is trying to do, pull back the curtain to reveal an underlayer of the human condition , new then with the emerging study of psychology and to announce the start of a titanic shift in the social fabric. **** The dominant presence of Mrs Morel in the lives of her sons felt incredible real and when ignoring the setting could have been written today. Truly great capture of human relationships. no reviews | add a review
Is contained inSons and Lovers; St Mawr; The Fox; The White Peacock; Love among the Haystacks; The Virgin and the Gypsy; Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence Sons and Lovers [and] The Fox [and] Love Among the Haystacks [and] Aaron's Rod [and] The Ladybird [and] Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence Has the adaptationHas as a reference guide/companionHas as a studyHas as a student's study guide
References to this work on external resources.
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