Sons and Lovers Introduction by David Ellis

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Introduction by David Ellis The struggle for power at the heart of a family in conflict, the mysteries of sexual initiation, and the pain of irretrievable loss are the universal motifs with which D. H. Lawrence fashions one of the world's most original autobiographical novels. Gertrude Morel is a refined woman who married beneath her and has come to loathe her brutal, working-class husband. She focuses her passion instead on her two sons, who return her love and despise their father. Trouble begins when Paul Morel, a budding artist, falls in love with a young woman who seems capable of rivaling his mother for possession of his soul. In the ensuing battle, he finds his path to adulthood tragically impeded by the enduring power of his mother's grasp. Published on the eve of World War I, SONS AND LOVERS confirmed Lawrence's genius and inaugurated the controversy over his explicit writing about sexuality and human relationships that would follow him to the end of his career.

D. H. Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885, in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England. His father was a coal miner, his mother a former lace worker and unsuccessful haberdasher. He began school just<br>before the age of four, but respiratory illness and a weak constitution forced him to remain home intermittently. Two months before his sixteenth birthday, he went to work as a clerk in a badly ventilated factory<br>that made medical supplies, and eventually contracted pneumonia. After a long convalescence, he got a job as a student teacher, but privately he resolved to become a poet. He began writing seriously in 1906<br>and entered University College, Nottingham, to earn his teacher's certificate. Two years later he started teaching elementary school full-time. He published his first poems in the English Review in 1909.