How Sons and Lovers drew on Middlemarch
A documented line of influence: D.H. Lawrence demonstrably engaged George Eliot’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Middlemarch
George Eliot · 1872
The Age of the NovelThe influenced
Sons and Lovers
D.H. Lawrence · 1913
ModernRelevance
5/10
On Sons and Lovers’s page
- Lawrence named Eliot as the origin of the psychological novel, the one who "put the action on the inside," and this book carries that technique to a new pitch: the drama is almost entirely internal, the war between Mrs Morel and her son fought in feeling, not incident.
- The patient, sympathetic anatomy of provincial lives that Eliot perfected in Middlemarch is the realist inheritance Lawrence works from before he breaks it open from within.
On Middlemarch’s page
- "It all started with George Eliot," Lawrence said, "it was she who put the action on the inside." He read her in his formative years and credited her with inventing the novel where the real events happen in the mind rather than the plot.
- That interiorized realism is the line Lawrence picks up and pushes into modernism, trading Eliot's wide social panorama for the close, unsparing anatomy of one family's inner life.