Sons and Lovers

Since its publication in 1913, D. H. Lawrence''s powerful and passionate third novel stands as one of the greatest autobiographical novels of the twentieth century. Here is the story of artist Paul Morel as a young man, his powerful relationship with his possessive mother, his passionate love affair with Miriam Leivers, his intense liaison with married Clara Dawes. Here, too, England''s Derbyshire springs to life with both is sooty mining villages and deep green pastures, a setting as full of contrasts as the deep emotions that rule this remarkable book.

Sons and Lovers is rich with universal truths about relationships; moreover, it brims with what Alfred Kazin has called Lawrence''s "magic sympathy, between himself and life." Continues Mr. Kazin: "No other writer of his imaginative standing has in our time written books that are so open to life...Since for Lawrence the great subject of literature was not the writer''s own consciousness but consciousness between people, the living felt relationship between them, it was his very concern to represent the ''shimmer'' of life, the ''wholeness''...that made possible his brilliance as a novelist."

With an Introduction by John Gross