How Sons and Lovers drew on Tess of the D’Urbervilles
A documented line of influence: D.H. Lawrence demonstrably engaged Thomas Hardy’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy · 1891
The Age of the NovelThe influenced
Sons and Lovers
D.H. Lawrence · 1913
ModernRelevance
7/10
On Sons and Lovers’s page
- Lawrence called Hardy his master and principal influence, and the year after this novel he wrote his longest piece of criticism, the Study of Thomas Hardy, partly misreading and rewriting Hardy's books into a manifesto for his own art.
- He opens, as Hardy does, on the land that shapes the hero, a mining village standing in for Wessex, and inherits Hardy's flesh-and-spirit split and his sensual attention to body and landscape. Where Hardy's protagonists are tragic and passive, Lawrence pushes toward self-conscious characters, but the lineage is his own to claim.
On Tess of the D’Urbervilles’s page
- Hardy was, by Lawrence's own account, his master and principal influence. The year after this novel he wrote the book-length Study of Thomas Hardy (1914), brooding over Hardy's heroines as he worked out his own theory of art.
- The Wessex machinery turns up in the Midlands: a landscape that conditions its people, and the flesh-versus-spirit split Lawrence read in Hardy's women. Paul Morel torn between the spiritual Miriam and the sensual Clara is Lawrence reworking that dichotomy in his own terms.