D.H. Lawrence has always been a controversial figure in English letters. Though some of his novels (particularly The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Sons and Lovers) had been well received, his unorthodox lifestyle and the frank treatment of sex, especially in his later novels, alienated many readers and critics, so by the time of his death in 1930, his reputation was so low that most of the obituaries in the news media were unfavorable if not openly hostile. But a few significant voices were much more sympathetic. E.M. Forster wrote an appreciative obituary. Aldous Huxley wrote a laudatory introduction to a collection of Lawrence’s letters published in 1932. Although T.S. Eliot was not a fan, writing that Lawrence’s work could appeal only to “the sick and debile and confused,” fellow poet Philip Larkin was effusive in his praise, saying that even if Lawrence had died after writing Sons and Lovers in 1913, he would still be “England’s greatest novelist.” But it was Cambridge scholar F.R. Leavis who did the most for Lawrence’s reputation, writing in his influential book The Great Tradition that Lawrence belonged with the great English novelists—Jane Austen, George Eiot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad. The 1960 court case over the “obscenity” of Lady Chatterley’s Lover made Lawrence the hero of the sexual revolution, and his reputation had reached its highest level.
In 1970, Kate Millett’s book Sexual Politics took a corrective feminist view of Lawrence, portraying him as the object of a “personal cult,” extolling the “mystery of the Phallus” and basically reducing women to passive sexual objects. Some women have since argued for the rehabilitation of Lawrence’s standing, so that by now, though still controversial, he is generally regarded as a significant English novelist. His novel The Rainbow (1915) appears on the Modern Library list of greatest English language novels of the twentieth century, the Guardian list of greatest English language novels, and the Observer list of the greatest novels worldwide. Women in Love (1920) also appears on the Modern Library list, the Penguin list of the hundred greatest novels selected by their readers, and the BBC list of the 100 greatest British novels. More impressive than these, Sons of Lovers (1913) was ranked as number 9 on the Modern Library list, and appears as well on the BBC list and on the Norwegian Book Club/Nobel Committee list of the greatest novels in the world. And it comes in as number 54 (alphabetically) on my own list of the ”100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language.”
Aside from the story itself, it is no insignificant matter that Sons and Lovers has the distinction of being (or at least the reputation of being) the very first truly “working class novel” in English literature. Certainly Dickens, for example, had written about working class people, but Lawrence was straight out of the working class, his father having been a coal miner in the Nottingham area. Sons and Lovers is, like Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist that would appear three years later, a semi-autobiographical novel, in which the protagonist, Paul Morel, an artistic young man born to a Nottingham coal miner, finds a way to transcend his birth and environment as D.H. Lawrence had done. But notably, Lawrence never distorts, exaggerates, belittles or romanticizes his characters. He presents coal miners, lace workers, factory laborers with detailed honesty.
Part one of the novel focuses not on the ultimate protagonist, Paul, but on his parents. Walter Morel, the rugged Nottingham coal miner meets the refined and well-educated Gertrude Coppard at a Christmas dance and the two begin a whirlwind and passionate courtship. Soon after their marriage, though, Gertrude begins to chafe at living on Walter’s coal miner’s salary in a rented house, and when in response Walter spends more and more time at the pub after work each day, she resents that even more, and transfers her affections particularly to her oldest child, William. She focuses on her family’s respectability, and is adamant that none of her children will become miners. William becomes completely attached to his mother, and tries to defend her from Walter’s occasional violence. When he is grown, he leaves home and goes to London to become a clerk in a surgical appliance factory, and finds himself moving into the middle class. He gets engaged to a girl whom his mother doesn’t think highly of, but before they can be married William contracts pneumonia and dies. Gertrude, of course, is devastated, but when her second son Paul also catches pneumonia, she transfers her love to him, nursing him back to health so that they become extremely close.
In part two of the novel, as Paul grows, he is drawn to his mother, but also feels smothered at times and wants to go out on his own, as William did. Paul, friends with some boys from the Leivers family who live on a neighboring farm, is drawn to their sister, Miriam, a shy girl who goes to Paul’s church. Paul and Miriam are attracted to one another intellectually, and spend a good deal of time on long walks discussing books, and Paul feels encouraged by Miriam in his desire to become an artist. But Gertrude disapproves of Miriam and fears the girl will be a barrier between her and Paul. Paul resists his budding love for Miriam, partly because of his mother’s disapproval, but also because of Miriam’s aversion to physical affection.
At the Leivers farm, Paul meets an acquaintance of Miriam’s named Clara Dawes. Clara is a dynamic woman, a suffragette passionate about women’s rights, who works in a factory in which Paul becomes an overseer. Clara is separated from her husband and is not averse to an extramarital relationship. When Paul, after pressuring Miriam into a sexual relationship that he finds unsatisfying, breaks with Miriam and falls into intimacy with Clara, not surprisingly his mother is not supportive of that development either. Now Paul is also beginning to make a bit of a name for himself as a painter, the pursuit of which must also occupy his mind and heart. Clara decides to return to her husband, and Paul’s mother falls ill with cancer.
All this leads to an unforgettable conclusion, which I will not spoil here. The story is, famously, significantly shaped by Lawrence’s own youth and young manhood. Beyond the working class setting, Paul’s parents are modeled quite closely on Lawrence’s own—his father was a coal miner and his mother more educated and quite close to Lawrence, and she did die of cancer shortly before he wrote the book. Lawrence had a close relationship with the cultured, intellectual neighbor Jessie Chambers, on whom the character of Miriam is based. Chambers had a hand in editing the novel and suggesting changes, as did the book’s first editor, who cut some 80 pages from the manuscript. An edition published in the 1990s restored those cuts, but the text Lawrence published in 1913 remains the one that made such a splash as something “new” in English fiction. We know that the novel went through three full rewrites after the first draft Lawrence sent to his publisher. When Jessie Cambers saw the final draft, she was appalled at what Lawrence had done with Miriam’s character (based on herself) and apparently never spoke to Lawrence again.
But beyond the autobiographical aspects of the novel, which are only interesting as sidelights, since it is the text itself that must entice us or fall flat, the Freudian aspect of the novel stands out as significant, depicting what may be archetypal psychological relationships. By the time Lawrence completed the book’s final draft, he had met Frieda Weekley, the wife of one of his former professors at the University of Nottingham. Frieda, whom he ultimately married, later said that she and Lawrence began talking about the Oedipus conflict within minutes of their first meeting. Paul’s antagonism toward his father (Lawrence later said he regretted how he’d demonized the father in this novel) and the smothering affection of his mother, who sees every potential wife as a rival, are clear manifestations of this phenomenon. The fact that Lawrence names the mother in the novel “Gertrude”—alluding to another literary Oedipus conflict in Hamlet—is a clear indication of what he means to illustrate. This Freudian undercurrent is perhaps a bit dated by contemporary standards, but one of Lawrence’s major contributions to literature in English, in addition to the working class perspective and the unflinching inclusion of sexuality in his fiction, is the conscious employment of psychological themes and situations, allowing for a depth of character that up until his time had been suggested rather than clinically diagnosed (metaphorically speaking). That it’s an analysis of Lawrence’s own childhood and youth is clear in Jessie Chambers’ assertion that Lawrence admitted to her after his mother’s death: “I’ve loved her, like a lover. That’s why I could never love you.”
Sons and Lovers was adopted as a BBC series in 1981, and another TV movie on Acorn in 2003, but director Jack Cardiff’s 1960 film version, which starred Dean Stockwell, Wendy Hiller, and Trevor Howard, was nominated for seven Academy Awards, and remains the best adaptation, if you want to watch one. But the novel is so multi-layered and complex its grandeur can only be suggested by the film version. So read it first!