Sons and Lovers (Signet Classics)

D. H. Lawrence’s great autobiographical novel paints a provocative portrait of an artist torn between affection for his mother and desire for two beautiful women. Set in the Nottinghamshire coalfields of Lawrence’s own boyhood, the story follows young Paul Morel’s growth into manhood in a British working-class family.

Gertrude Morel, Paul’s puritanical mother, concentrates all her love and attention on Paul, nurturing his talents as a painter. When she muses that he might marry someday and desert her, the attentive son swears he will never leave her. Then Paul falls in love—with not one woman but two—and must eventually choose between them.…

The son of a miner, the prolific novelist, poet, and travel writer David Herbert Lawrence was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, in 1885. He attended Nottingham University and found employment as a schoolteacher. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1911, the same year his beloved mother died and he quit teaching to devote himself to writing. The next year Lawrence published Sons and Lovers and ran off to Germany with Frieda Weekley, his former tutor’s wife; they married in 1914. Suffering from tuberculosis, he was in constant flight from his ill health, traveling through Europe and around the world by way of Australia and Mexico, settling for a time in Taos, NM. During his life, he produced more than forty volumes of fiction, poetry, drama, criticism, philosophy and travel writing. Among his most famous works are The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920) and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). He died in 1930 in Venice.