Sons and Lovers (Wordsworth Classics) (Wordsworth Classics) Paperback - 1997

About this book

From the rear cover

Lawrence's first major novel was also the first in the English language to explore ordinary working-class life from the inside. No writer before or since has written so well about the intimacies enforced by a tightly knit mining community and by a family where feelings are never hidden for long. When the marriage between Walter Morel and his sensitive, high-minded wife begins to break down, the bitterness of their frustration seeps into their children's lives. Their second son, Paul, craves the warmth of family and community, but knows that he must sacrifice everything in the struggle for independence if he is not to repeat his parents' failure. Lawrence's powerful description of Paul's single-minded efforts to define himself sexually and emotionally through relationships with two women - the innocent, old-fashioned Miriam Leivers and the experienced, provocatively modern Clara Dawes - makes this a novel as much for the beginning of the twenty-first century as it was for the beginning of the twentieth.

First Edition Identification

Gerald Duckworth and Company Ltd. first published Sons and Lovers in the UK in 1913. First editions have dark blue binding, gold lettering stamped on the upper cover and spine, and a 20-page segment of publisher's advertisements at the end. There are at least two or three issues of the first edition: copies have been noted both with the bound-in title without date and with the tipped-in title with the date on the copyright page.