Read this if you…
- Like the topic of a possessive parent you can't pull free of
- Like characters who struggle with all their relationships
Skip this if you…
- want characters that act realistically
- don't like messy romance as a theme
The 
Take
I just didn’t find the internal motivations of the characters realistic, and the steamy romantic parts lost a lot of their resonance because of it
The lineage through Sons and Lovers
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. Sons and Lovers built on it. - 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.
- Middlemarch by George Eliot. Sons and Lovers built on it. - 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.
Depicted in Art
Victoria Street, Eastwood, with No. 8a — the terraced miner's house where Lawrence was born and grew up — the working-class colliery town behind the novel's 'Bestwood'.
The winding-engine house and steel headstocks of Bestwood Colliery, Nottinghamshire — the pithead machinery of the coal industry that dominates the Morel household.
The Brinsley Colliery headstocks rising over the Nottinghamshire countryside in autumn, the pit-and-fields landscape the Morels live between.
Recommended Editions
Penguin Classics
2006
The one to start with. It prints the full Cambridge text edited by Helen and Carl Baron (about a tenth longer than the censored 1913 first edition, with the cut passages restored) wrapped in a readable Penguin package, with a sharp introduction by Blake Morrison.
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Notable Quotes
And I never shall meet the right woman while you live.
Screen & Stage
Sons and Lovers
Film · 1960
Jack Cardiff
Sons and Lovers
TV · 1981
Stuart Burge
Sons & Lovers
TV · 2003
Stephen Whittaker
Posters via The Movie Database (TMDB)
- Philip Larkin, poet, 1922–1985: "I have been reading 'Sons and Lovers' and feel ready to die. If Lawrence had been killed after writing that book he'd still be England's greatest novelist."
- E.M. Forster, novelist, 1879–1970: "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation"
- Marilyn Monroe, actress, model, 1926–1962: A serious reader, she kept two editions of Sons and Lovers and several other D.H. Lawrence titles in her personal library; one literary profile counts Lawrence among her loves.
- Harold Bloom, literary critic, 1930–2019: Among the books that have been important and influential in Western culture — placing Sons and Lovers in the canon.
- Robert Lindsay, actor, 1949–: Chose Sons and Lovers as his book on the BBC's Desert Island Discs, and has elsewhere named it his favorite book.