Sons and Lovers (Modern Library Classics)
by D.H. Lawrence
List Price:
Our Price: $4.80
You Save: $7.15 (60%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions
Book Summary Information
Author: D.H. LawrenceIntroduction: Geoff Dyer
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-08-17
ISBN: 0375753737
Number of pages: 752
Publisher: Modern Library
Book Reviews of Sons and Lovers (Modern Library Classics)
Book Review: Touched by genius...
Summary: 5 Stars
D.H. Lawrence was a guy that came out of the womb knowing how to write. You read his prose and his innate genius quickly becomes self-evident--this is an artist for whom the creative act of literature is akin to a Mozart symphony--airtight, beautiful, logical, NATURAL. Floooooowing.
Compare Lawrence with someone like Wallace Stegner--the latter being a writer with a fair amount of talent and a heckuva lot of dedication...but whose works seem...synthetic. Over-written, almost. As if he would look at a sentence and say, "This needs another adjective here--and a polysyllabic synonym for this word here."
With Lawrence, there is no sense of writerly straaaaaaining for profundity...no sense of sweaty self-consciousness. The sentences seemingly emanate from the ether, with a fundamental soundness and beauty which only a tiny, tiny few lucky people are capable of creating.
Stegner could study the craft of writing for thirty years and still produce an inferior book to the twenty-seven-year-old Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. Lawrence had IT. He was the real deal. The genuine article. He WAS Mozart (Stegner was you-know-who).
Sons and Lovers is a masterpiece. Not without its flaws, surely, but a masterpiece all the same. Some parts drag; some parts are choppy; some parts are frankly uninteresting. Notwithstanding that, it is just a single rung below Lolita and Under the Volcano in terms of quality.
The MLA concluded that Sons and Lovers is the ninth best novel of the 20th century--and it's hard to quibble with that assessment. (Even though it is ranked AHEAD of the supernally brilliant--and better--Under the Volcano.)
If you are a serious connoisseur of literature, this is one you have to get under the belt.
Summary of Sons and Lovers (Modern Library Classics)
With a new Introduction by Geoff DyerCommentary by Anthony Burgess, Jessie Chambers, Frieda Lawrence, V.S. Pritchett, Kate Millett, and Alfred Kazin
Of all Lawrence's work, Sons and Lovers tells us most about the emotional source of his ideas," observed Diana Trilling. "The famous Lawrence theme of the struggle for sexual power--and he is sure that all the struggles of civilized life have their root in this primary contest--is the constantly elaborated statement of the fierce battle which tore Lawrence's family."
Sons and Lovers is one of the landmark novels of the twentieth century. When it appeared in 1913, it was immediately recognized as the first great modern restatement of the oedipal drama, and it is now widely considered the major work of D. H. Lawrence's early period. This intensely autobiographical novel recounts the story of Paul Morel, a young artist growing to manhood in a British working-class family rife with conflict. The author's vivid evocation of the all-consuming nature of possessive love and sexual attraction makes this one of his most powerful novels.
For the critic Kate Millett, "Sons and Lovers is a great novel because it has the ring of something written from deeply felt experience. The past remembered, it conveys more of Lawrence's own knowledge of life than anything else he wrote. His other novels appear somehow artificial beside it."
Sons and Lovers was the first modern portrayal of a phenomenon that later, thanks to Freud, became easily recognizable as the Oedipus complex. Never was a son more indentured to his mother's love and full of hatred for his father than Paul Morel, D.H. Lawrence's young protagonist. Never, that is, except perhaps Lawrence himself. In his 1913 novel he grappled with the discordant loves that haunted him all his life--for his spiritual childhood sweetheart, here called Miriam, and for his mother, whom he transformed into Mrs. Morel. It is, by Lawrence's own account, a book aimed at depicting this woman's grasp: "as her sons grow up she selects them as lovers--first the eldest, then the second. These sons are urged into life by their reciprocal love of their mother--urged on and on. But when they come to manhood, they can't love, because their mother is the strongest power in their lives."
Of course, Mrs. Morel takes neither of her two elder sons (the first of whom dies early, which further intensifies her grip on Paul) as a literal lover, but nonetheless her psychological snare is immense. She loathes Paul's Miriam from the start, understanding that the girl's deep love of her son will oust her: "She's not like an ordinary woman, who can leave me my share in him. She wants to absorb him." Meanwhile, Paul plays his part with equal fervor, incapable of committing himself in either direction: "Why did his mother sit at home and suffer?... And why did he hate Miriam, and feel so cruel towards her, at the thought of his mother. If Miriam caused his mother suffering, then he hated her--and he easily hated her." Soon thereafter he even confesses to his mother: "I really don't love her. I talk to her, but I want to come home to you."
The result of all this is that Paul throws Miriam over for a married suffragette, Clara Dawes, who fulfills the sexual component of his ascent to manhood but leaves him, as ever, without a complete relationship to challenge his love for his mother. As Paul voyages from the working-class mining world to the spheres of commerce and art (he has fair success as a painter), he accepts that his own achievements must be equally his mother's. "There was so much to come out of him. Life for her was rich with promise. She was to see herself fulfilled... All his work was hers."
The cycles of Paul's relationships with these three women are terrifying at times, and Lawrence does nothing to dim their intensity. Nor does he shirk in his vivid, sensuous descriptions of the landscape that offers up its blossoms and beasts and "shimmeriness" to Paul's sensitive spirit. Sons and Lovers lays fully bare the souls of men and earth. Few books tell such whole, complicated truths about the permutations of love as resolutely without resolution. It's nothing short of searing to be brushed by humanity in this manner. --Melanie Rehak
Classics Books
- Arts & Photography
- Biographies & Memoirs
- Business & Investing
- Children's Books
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Computers & Internet
- Cooking, Food & Wine
- Entertainment
- Gay & Lesbian
- Health, Mind & Body
- History
- Home & Garden
- Horror
- Law
- Literature & Fiction
- Mystery & Thrillers
- Nonfiction
- Outdoors & Nature
- Parenting & Families
- Professional & Technical
- Reference
- Religion & Spirituality
- Romance
- Science
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Sports
- Teens
- Travel
Native sonby Richard Wright
Perennial Library; Published: 1987; Paperback; Book
Best price: $1.75
Native Son: And How Bigger Was Bornby Richard Wright
Perennial; Published: 1993-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $60.00
Raphael and the Noble Taskby Catherine Salton
Harper; Published: 2000-10-24; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $5.49
Price in other shops:
Island (Perennial Classics)by Aldous Huxley
Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Published: 2002-07-30; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.00
Price in other shops:
A Tree Grows in Brooklynby Betty Smith
Harper; Published: 2001-11-13; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $14.81
Price in other shops:
The Great Divorce CDby C. S. Lewis
HarperAudio; Published: 2003-11-25; Audio CD; Book
Best price: $12.70
Price in other shops:
Great Expectationsby Charles Dickens
Macmillan Pub Co; Published: 1979-06; Paperback; Book
Price in other shops:
This Side of Paradiseby Fitzgerald
Scribner Paper Fiction; Published: 1988-09-30; Paperback; Book
Best price: $1.95
Price in other shops:
Black Coffee (Poirot)by Agatha Christie
Harper Collins Pb; Published: 2002-12-02; Paperback; Book
Best price: $68.32
Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1960s)by Joan Didion
Flamingo; Published: 2001-04-17; Paperback; Book
Best price: $22.25
To the Lighthouse (Oxford World's Classics)by Virginia Woolf
OUP Oxford; Published: 2008-06-12; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.01
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence - Restored Modern Editionby D.H. Lawrence
El Paso Norte Press; Published: 2009-08-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $14.64
Price in other shops:
Tropic of Cancerby Henry Miller
Grove Press; Published: 1994-01-06; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.95
Price in other shops:
The Rainbow (Vintage Classics)by D. H. Lawrence
Random House UK; Published: 2011-05-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.43
Price in other shops:
Ulysses (Gabler Edition)by James Joyce, Hans Gabler
Vintage; Published: 1986-05-12; Paperback; Book
Best price: $9.99
Price in other shops:
Lady Chatterley's Lover (Bantam Classics)by D.H. Lawrence
Bantam Books; Published: 1983-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $2.23
Price in other shops:
Women in Love (Vintage Classics)by D. H. Lawrence
Vintage Classics; Published: 2011-09-12; Paperback; Book
Best price: $10.58
Darkness at Noonby Arthur Koestler
Scribner; Published: 2006-10-17; Paperback; Book
Best price: $5.77
Price in other shops:
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Classics)by James Joyce
Penguin Classics; Published: 2003-03-25; Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.95
Price in other shops:
Women in Love (Penguin Classics)by D. H. Lawrence
Penguin Classics; Published: 2007-09-25; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.51
Price in other shops: