Sons and Lovers

at all describes this very unusual book. It is hardly a story; rather the first part of a man’s life, from his birth until his 25th year, the conditions surrounding him, his strength and his numerous weaknesses, put before us in a manner which misses no subtlest effect either of emotion or environment. And the heroine of the book is not sweetheart, but mother; the mother with whose marriage the novel begins, with whose pathetic death it reaches its climax. The love for each other of the mother and her son, Paul Morel, is the mainspring of both their lives; it is portrayed tenderly, yet with a truthfulness which slurs nothing even of that friction which is unavoidable between members of two different generations.... It is wonderfully real, this daily life of the Morel family and the village wherein they lived as reflected in Mr. Lawrence’s pages; the more real because he never flaunts his knowledge of the intimate details of the existence led by these households whose men folk toil underground. They slip from his pen so unobtrusively that it is only when we pause and consider that we recognize how full and complete is the background against which he projects his principal characters—Mr. and Mrs. Morel, Paul, Miriam, and Clara.

Paul himself is a person who awakens interest rather than sympathy ; it is difficult not to despise him a little for his weakness, his constant need—of that strengthening he sought from two other women, but which only his splendid, indomitable little mother could give him—a fact of which he was constantly aware, though he acknowledged it only at the very end. And it is not easy upon any grounds to excuse his treatment of Miriam, even though it was a spiritual self-defense which urged him to disloyalty. Mr. Lawrence has small regard for what we term conventional morality; nevertheless, though plain spoken to a degree, his book is not in the least offensive.... Although this is a novel of over 500 closely printed pages the style is terse—so terse that at times it produces an effect as of short, sharp hammer strokes. Yet it is flexible, too, as shown by its success in depicting varying shades of mood, in expressing those more intimate emotions which are so very nearly inexpressible. Yet, when all is said, it is the complex character of Miriam, she who was only Paul’s “conscience, not his mate,” and the beautiful bond between the restless son and the mother whom “his soul could not leave” even when she slept and “dreamed her young dream” which makes this book one of rare excellence.

—September 21, 1913

John Galsworthy

I’ve finished Sons and Lovers. I’ve nothing but praise for all the part that deals with the Mother, the Father and the sons; but I’ve a lot besides praise for the love part. Neither of the women, Miriam nor Clara, convince me a bit; they are only material out of which to run wild on the thesis that this kind of man does not want the woman, only a woman. And that kind of revelling in the shades of sex emotions seems to me anaemic. Contrasted with Maupassant‘s—a frank sensualist’s—dealing with such emotions, it has a queer indecency; it doesn’t see the essentials, it revels in the unessentials. It’s not good enough to spend time and ink in describing the penultimate sensations and physical movements of people getting into a state of rut; we all know them too well. There’s genius in the book, but not in that part of the book. The body’s never worth while, and the sooner Lawrence recognizes that, the better—the men we swear by—Tolstoy, Turgenev, Tchekov, Maupassant, Flaubert, France— knew that great truth, they only use the body, and that sparingly, to reveal the soul. In Lawrence’s book the part that irritates me most is the early part with Miriam, whence the body is rigidly excluded, but in which you smell the prepossession which afterwards takes possession. But most of the Mother’s death is magnificent.

—from a letter to Edward Garnett (April 13, 1914)

D. H. Lawrence

Let us hesitate no longer to announce that the sensual passions and mysteries are equally sacred with the spiritual mysteries and passions. Who would deny it any more? The only thing unbearable is the degradation, the prostitution of the living mysteries in us. Let man only approach his own self with a deep respect, even reverence for all that the creative soul, the God-mystery within us, puts forth. Then we shall all be sound and free. Lewdness is hateful because it impairs our integrity and our proud being.

The creative, spontaneous soul sends forth its promptings of desire and aspiration in us. These promptings are our true fate, which is our business to fulfill. A fate dictated from outside, from theory or from circumstance, is a false fate.

—from his foreword to Women in Love (1920)

Virginia Woolf

Perhaps the verdicts of critics would read less preposterously and their opinions would carry greater weight if, in the first place, they bound themselves to declare the standard which they had in mind, and, in the second, confessed the course, bound, in the case of a book read for the first time, to be erratic, by which they reached their final decision. Our standard for Mr. Lawrence, then, is a high one. Taking into account the fact, which is so constantly forgotten, that never in the course of the world will there be a second Meredith or a second Hardy, for the sufficient reason that there have already been a Meredith and a Hardy, why, we sometimes asked, should there not be a D. H. Lawrence? By that we meant that we might have to allow him the praise, than which there is none higher, of being himself an original; for such work as came our way was disquieting, as the original work of a contemporary writer always is.

—from the Times Literary Supplement (December 2, 1920)

T. S. Eliot

One writer, and indeed, in my opinion, the most interesting novelist in England—who has apparently been somewhat affected by Dostoevsky—is Mr. D. H. Lawrence. Mr. Lawrence has progressed—by fits and starts, it is true; for he has perhaps done nothing as good as a whole as Sons and Lovers.

—from The Dial (September 1922)

Questions 1. Galsworthy compares Lawrence to Tolstoy. Is it the breadth of Sons and Lovers alone that warrants immediate comparison to Tolstoy, or is there a deeper connection between the two writers? How do the two authors’ treatments of morality differ? Does Lawrence more closely resemble Dostoevsky, as T. S. Eliot suggests?2. Does Paul Morel have an Oedipus complex?3. To what do you attribute the conflict between Mr. and Mrs. Morel? There is, of course, the difference in class and education. Is that the whole of it? Paul sides with Mrs. Morel, as the young Lawrence sided with his mother. The older Lawrence sided with his father, on whom Mr. Morel is modeled. Whose side are you on?4. Lawrence’s natural settings are often symbolic. They color, reflect, or suggest the meaning of what happens in them. Analyze one instance.5. In a preface to his novel Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence wrote, “In point of style, fault is often found with continual, slightly modified repetition. The only answer is that it is natural to the author; and that every natural crisis in emotion or passion or understanding comes from this pulsing, frictional to-and-fro which works up to culmination.” Do you agree that “every natural crisis in emotion or passion or understanding” comes from this kind of movement? Can you find a passage in the novel that bears out Lawrence’s claim?

For Further Reading

Biography

Delavenay, Emile. D. H. Lawrence: The Man and His Work, The Formative Years: 1885- 1919. London: Heinemann, 1972. An analysis of Lawrence’s early life viewed through his writing; a good synthesis of biographical material with literary discussion.

Murry, John Middleton. Son of Woman: The Story of D. H. Lawrence. London and Toronto: Jonathan Cape, 1931.