5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sons and Lovers: D.H. Lawrence's Unforgettable tale of life in a Nottingham miner's home, August 7, 2008
This review is from: Sons and Lovers (Penguin Classics) (Mass Market Paperback)
DH Lawrence was born in Nottingham, England in 1885. He died at age 44 in Vence, France in 1930. In between those birth and death dates he created great fiction. His first big book and, probably, still his greatest is "Sons and Lovers."
The novel is highly autobiographical. Walter Morel is a crude, hard drinking miner who has no intellectual interests. He weds the etheral and lovely Gertrude. The couple have four children: William, Annie, Paul and Arthur. William, the eldest, is a good boy engaged to a flighty woman. He dies at an early age. The other children, with the noted exception of Paul, live mundane lives.
Paul is the Lawrence figure in the book. He is a momma's boy tied to her tight apron strings. Paul loves books, learning and the beauties of flowering nature. He has long affairs with the beautiful but shy Miriam who lives on a nearby farm and Clara Dawes (resembling Lawrence's wife Frieda Weekly). He marries neither woman leaving his boyhood home for adventures elsewhere. As the novel ends, Paul will continue his artistic work and his spiritual questing.
There is little action in this novel. It is, instead, a pyschological probing of such human affairs as familial and erotic love, death, suffering and the process of saying goodbye to childhood. It is a deeply moving book. One cannot refrain from crying at the death of Paul's saintly mother.
"Sons and Lovers" was written before Lawrence was scorned by critics and damaged by life. It is an excellent book which everyone should read if they are interested in life within a family. This book is rich with descriptions of nature and is a joy to read. Excellent!
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Read, December 5, 2008
i approached this book reluctantly as i felt that it was far to detached from my current surroundings to have a note of relevance. I was pleasantly shocked and rewarded for my efforts at broadening my range of classics, this novel is an amazing tale of love and the complexities of family in relation to it. If you haven't read it do so!
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Intense and Compelling, February 27, 2011
This review is from: Sons and Lovers (Penguin Classics) (Mass Market Paperback)
This is my first exposure to D.H. Lawrence, and what a powerful book to open with! Sons and Lovers tells the story of Paul Morley, the second son of a well-educated mother and crass collier of a father. Paul lives a fairly regular, if a little sickly, childhood and goes to work at the early age of 14. As he grows older, he finds the intense love he feels for his mother drawn away from her, first by the timid and Romantic (with a capital R) Miriam, and later by a suffragette named Clara Dawes. Throughout the entire novel, Paul and his mother share an intense, sometimes to the point of discomfort, relationship that plays heavily into the very dramatic conclusion of the novel. Beautifully crafted and wonderfully descriptive, Sons and Lovers is a wonderful novel and is sure to appeal to a broad audience.
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