D.H. Lawrence certainly wrote some of the greatest English novels of the last one-hundred years. Originally published in 1913, his novel, Sons & Lovers, was considered his first masterpiece. The semi-autobiographical novel tells the story of Paul Morel and his mother, Gertrude, and is an examination of working class life, artistic ambition, and the lasting hold a maternal relationship can have on a child.

The book begins with the introduction of Gertrude, an intelligent and feisty woman who married a barely-literate miner named Walter Morel. She is quite unhappy with her husband, who drinks and has a bad temper, but together, they produce four children. Gertrude places her hopes for a satisfying life onto her children, specifically her sensitive and artistically-inclined son, Paul, after he falls ill to a bout of pneumonia.  

As Paul grows, he proves to be his mother’s child. They form an unusually close bond in which Mrs. Morel lives through Paul, and Paul lives when he can tell his mother about his life. Because of their close ties, however, Paul has difficulties developing as his own person, rather than one part of a closely-tied pair. Paul struggles with his painting, and has almost masochistic relationships with two young women.

Paul has an attenuated relationship with a farmer’s daughter named Miriam, who has a purely spiritual love for Paul and a tenderness about the world that is too intense for Paul to handle. His mother doesn’t like Miriam because she fears that Miriam wants to take all of Paul for himself. He also has a relationship with a woman named Clara, who has split with her husband Baxter temporarily. He also cannot commit to Clara, and eventually facilitates a reconciliation between the separated couple.

Lawrence, too, had a barely-literate miner father and an unsatisfied mother. He works as a clerk as Paul did, and was sick for quite a while with pneumonia. Perhaps the book’s autobiographical nature is what makes for its quiet intensity.

The book has very little real plot, but is primarily an intense study of an unsatisfied mother’s relationship with her son. Gertrude Morel is certainly a woman trapped by her womanly circumstances, but Lawrence also illustrates the difficulties of these unsatisfied children who are burdened with their mothers’ hopes on top of their own. It is also remarkably modern; Lawrence’s finely-drawn character and relationship studies are perhaps made more relatable because of the little attention focused on an intriguing plot.