While "Sons and Lovers" would not be a best seller if it was written by a current day author, it was, for its times, quite controversial and forward-leaning and should always be considered one of fiction's classics. On its published date, 1914, the world was enamored with Freud's Oedipal fixation and found itself newly-awoken to the sexual side of humanity. Before this era, sexuality was either repressed or made a separate entity away from emotional caring. D.H. Lawrence relit the 'Oedipal candle' and the mother/son controversy went on. While neither Freud nor Lawrence ever fully understood their own sexuality, let alone that of others, this piece of autobiographical fiction allowed society to continue in its personal understanding of its physical self.

While I fully agree with other critics that the main thrust of this novel is the interaction of mother and son, I also feel there is much more that can be psychosocially understood from its reading. The mother, in today's terminology was a narcissist. All of her actions throughout this tale are directed back towards herself and her own happiness. She married a very handsome and well-built man because she mistakenly thought that he owned the house in which he was living and that he could provide for her in the manner in which she felt she deserved. When this proved false and her plans became futile, she turned her selfish need for personal fulfillment towards her sons. She felt that it was their duty, and not their choice, to make her happy. Throughout the novel Paul, the younger of the two, is left with this onerous and suffacating burden. In very short order he, too, changes his need structure to rely on her for his recognition and fulfillment. But, his mother being a narcissist, she can never provide this in a mature and caring manner. Instead, she does so in a self-devised and incomplete manner making Paul to always wanting more and more and never feeling complete. He, in turn, was never able to fulfill her insatiable needs of attention and personal fulfillment. Neither person took any responsibility for their own actions or their own psyche and, because of that, eventually developed a love/hate relationship with each other. This is dramatically shown in the fact that Paul, while continuing to profess his love and caring for her, actually murders his mother while she lie on her death bed.

In social situations the damage that Paul suffered at the hands of his mother, were generalized into the rest of his life. His work was never fulfilling, his love/hate relationship with his mother translated into an approach/avoidance behavior with women and his ultimate goals in life continued to focus on what would make his mother happy with little or no concern for himself. Because his mother had never equated her sexual life with any type of caring or emotion, Paul, too, made a divide between sex and love and often mistakenly confused one with the other. He never allowed himself to feel both together or, for that matter, had the capability to do so. The women in Paul's life had their own irrational agendas. One sacrificed her life while waiting for Paul to eventually admit his love for her and the other lived her life based solely on her own selfish and ego driven emotions while leaving rational thought unheeded. The author, if this truly is his autobiographical sketch, certainly lived and most probably died a very lonely and disturbed life. He never made the effort nor probably never had the emotional strength to understand himself as an independent being apart from the maternal demands that were continually laid at his feet.

While the subject of this book does merit 5 stars, I only gave it 4 stars because of the rambling and diffuse writing that occurs in the first half of the book. Yes, I understand that the author himself viewed life as a rambling and purposeless process but we, as readers. do not need to re-experience his self-confusion in order to fully understand it. We, too, have our own life experiences from which we can draw and do not need our hands held while we come to understand the author's internal insecurities. Nor do we need to have the various derivatives of the work 'hate' be used in nearly every paragraph in order to understand the love/hate relationship that the author had with everything around him. We, too, have a degree of intelligence that can comprehend intense negative feelings directed towards the world.

I bought this book because my brother was reading it and kept saying how interesting it was. The story is about a woman who marries someone below her class and then invests everything in her children. The story focuses on her relationship with her son Paul. The story follows the life of Paul from birth through early adulthood. His tightly knit relationship with his mother seems to have a negative impact on his love life. How does it all end?! You'll have to read it to find out!

Despite what one reviewer said, this book cannot have been written from Paul's POV as he talks about people and circumstances that occurred before he was born, and about peoples' inner thoughts of which he could have no knowledge. As I read this 3rd person omniscient novel. I kept thinking "Oh, hell, get on with it!" Having read Lady Chatterly's Lover, I knew this tome was going to be a slog-fest, and I was right. On the other hand, in 1913, the reading public had lots of time and no TV soap operas, so I suppose they didn't mind tedious passages. For example, Lawrence labors over mom's and Paul's love of flowers (she's thrilled to find blue flowers in winter) and I wanted to scream, "Okay, I get it, flowers symbolize fecundity and beauty, and mom and son(s) have a relationship bordering on incestuous, only without the sex. Now what?" I started skipping whole passages and lost nothing of the chain of events. Dad is always a no-goodnik, and mom is always a prim saint. It's an okay story, but what was the point again? Oh, yeah, life is nasty, brutish and short. And quite a bore for poor, downtrodden Mom. I guess Lawrence's desire to be on the cutting edge with his self-proclaimed masterpieve didn't include an obvious alternate conclusion: the book could have been titled, Gay Sons and Lovers.

That it was written in 1913, when people were still shocked by tasetlessness and for the most part unaware of Freudian psychology, I'm sure it was steamy for its day. But this story could have been written as a twenty page short story and should have been.

This novel was required reading in one of my college classes. I think it's a good story, well-written, with conflict and drama. Lawrence creates a very real setting, a very real time period, and real characters who are in conflict over their wants and needs. The conflict between working class necessity (putting bread on the table) and middle class values (wanting the bread served on fine china set on lace tablecloths) reverberates throughout the story. I found it sad that the character (and, presumably, D.H. Lawrence himself) chose one parent and one set of values over another, though I do understand that he felt he had to do this in order to live a literary life. The characters in this story aren't exactly likable, though they aren't bad people. For me, this book succeeds because it paints a real portrait of different class values.

My edition takes pains to make clear that Lawrence had not read Freud before he wrote this book, and was only slightly familiar with psychoanalytic theory when the novel was published. That makes it all the more interesting that Sons and Lovers is basically a case history of an Oedipal Complex. Also, Lawrence's alter-ego Paul comes across as a person who (as Lawrence would later say of himself)'tends to homosexuality' but there too it is unclear whether Lawrence realizes this or is revealing more than he means to. Generally the feeling is that of reading someone's most intimate diary, and wondering if he intended it for publication all along. And while the diarist is a pompous, annoying sort of a person, it's intriguing enough that you're inspired to keep going.

As added fun while reading, play a game I'm calling Misogynist Bingo and see how many times in the book a female character 'bends', 'bows', or 'drops' her head, compared with how often a male character does. Emo-chick Miriam's neck, particularly, is liable to snap in two at any minute from sheer overuse.

Has any literary reputation (maybe Hemingway's) fallen like Lawrence's has? In my parents old set of encyclopedias, c. 1950, his entry was a paragraph long. In the 1970 Ency. Brtit. it was pages long. He was suddenly on par with Joyce... When I went through school I caught the very tail end of this mass admiration for Lawrence. It was a strange admiration too, mostly male critics gone overboard, calling such juvenile drivel as Lady Chatterly great literature and whatnot. I read practically all of Lawrences works, no mean feat, because the man wrote like a banshee. I also read the bios and the Letters... And I've come to the conclusion that Lawrence wrote one beautiful novel and that's it: Sons and Lovers. That Lawrence later disliked the novel is interesting because it evidently ran afoul of his ludicrous philosphy of life (and that so many intelligent British men at that time were taken with such nonsense is a bit disturbing and quite funny; I can't think of any woman infatuated with with his loopy ideas). This novel is written in beautiful prose and it evokes an England that no longer exists; nothing else that Lawrence attempted comes close to the beauty in this novel... Some of his earlier, short stories and novellas do, but they are few and far between.

T.S. Eliot once said that Henry James had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it. Lawrence is an example of the absolute opposite: of a writer getting so carried away with his ideas that the art starts to suffer. He's like Tolstoy (but on a vastly smaller scale) in that he had to propagandize his ideas at every little turn... But Sons and Lovers is definitely worth the reputation that it has had all along.

I have long been interested in the work of D. H. Lawrence. His reputation as one of the greatest novelists of the past one hundred years, as well as the censorship battles at the turn of the last century which led to some of his works being banned in England until the 1960's were all reasons which led me, finally, to read him. I started with Sons and Lovers, which was originally published in 1913.

Sons and Lovers takes place in Nottingham near the coalfields. Paul Morel is one of three "sons" in the story and Miriam, Mrs. Clara Dawes as well as Paul's mother, Mrs. Gertrude Morel are all the "lovers". Mrs. Morel is married to a husband who pays her no attention, and who would rather go out all night drinking. She is thus devoted to her two oldest boys, William and Paul, and from an early age they are coddled to excess. They develop into mama's boys who cannot make any decision without thinking of the effect it would have on their mother. When William dies after a brief illness, Mrs. Morel becomes almost frightfully attached to Paul, and their exchanges seem incestuous with the terms of endearment they use. Paul's feelings towards his mother seem nothing less than Oedipean. The tender words exchanged between mother and son are far more passionate than the dialogue between either of Paul's lovers, Miriam or Clara. Since I had not read about the plot of Sons and Lovers before I started the novel, I did not know if mother and son would develop a sexual relationship. It certainly seemed plausible by their dialogue. Since Paul confesses to his mother, as well as to his two lovers, that he can never marry them (and they soon figure out why) it is not far-fetched to imagine that possibility.

There is much passion in the story and the sex that takes place is subdued and not even written about in euphemism. Quite abruptly the younger characters turn on their lovers and Sons and Lovers suffers, in my opinion, from an overabundance of phrases such as "She hated him for it" or other such phrases using "detest" in its place. One minuscule fly in the ointment of sweet caresses might turn Miriam instantly against Paul with a phrase such as that. It grew tiresome to read that once again Paul "hates" Clara or that Miriam suddenly "detested" Paul.

Clara Dawes is separated from her husband Baxter yet both see other people on the side. One hundred years ago it might have seemed scandalous for a British woman who was still legally married to be seen in public courting other gentlemen. Clara's mother, Mrs. Radford, was my favourite minor character in that she spoke like someone who has seen everything and wasn't afraid to call a spade a spade. She spoke her mind and provided comic relief. She was also likely a target for the censors of one hundred years ago for her degree of openness.

I enjoyed Sons and Lovers for its descriptions of working-class England at the start of the 1900's. Lawrence writes some characters' dialogue in Nottingham dialect which fortunately was not difficult to decipher, despite the abundance of apostrophes and briticisms. Lawrence finds new ways to describe the countryside and flowers, coaly skies and hazy mornings. It was a delight to read his inventive descriptions for such dismal and dreary images. I plan to read more of Lawrence this year and thoroughly enjoyed Sons and Lovers.

This is a great novel, a masterpiece.

It is full of deep psychological insight and it helps if you have a smattering of the ideas of Freud and Jung. With these ideas it's possible to decode just how damaging it is to a child, when the mother switches the love she had for her husband to the son. Add to the already explosive mix a drunken and physically abusive father then there is no escape for Paul (the Lawrence figure in this highly autobiographical story).

After such a brutal upbringing, there is surprisingly, a positive ending, where the young man chooses life over death. His relationships with Miriam and Clara have allowed him some normal development, although, in particular, with Miriam there is much grief as the mother sees her as a rival for Paul's love.

Reading, studying and then having the joy of sharing the novel with young people, when I taught it at `A' Level has been one of the high points of my life.

In my own novel `A Song for Jo' Lawrence has an influence on the intellectual and emotional development of the two main characters, Jo and Chris, who are college students studying English. Other great literature from Keats, Emily Bronte and Shakespeare (amongst others) is worked into the narrative. It is a love story with a difference!

People of all ages and sex have enjoyed it.

It's available on Amazon - please follow the link.

A SONG FOR JO

This book was rather interesting, possibly because it is about mommas boys and I happen to currently be dating one...lol it is kind of an inside view from the mothers perspective. Great read, would and have recommended it. I think its only 400 pages or so, so its not exceedingly difficult. I am most likely going to read some of D.H. Lawrence's other books now.

Paul Morel, the protagonist of Sons and Lovers, can only give his heart to one woman. And as long as his mother is alive, she will sabotage any relationship that Paul tries to form. Paul wavers with Miriam and Clara, two love interests, because he is unconditionally bound to his mother. He has seen how she has been mistreated and vows not to make her life harder. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers is a rehashing of Oedipus Rex, with richer, more developed characters whose fate is equally heartbreaking.