Black pits blight the once sweet, rural countryside, where living conditions among the working classes are notoriously awful. “She bore him, loved him, kept him, and his love turned back into her, so that he could not be free to go forward with his own life, really love another woman.”īestwood, a small town between Nottingham and Derby, is a coal- and iron-mining area.Lawrence’s literary reputation has fluctuated over the decades, from a writer of obscenity to sexually liberating genius to reactionary sexist and now, more justly, to a gifted and complicated author.People were also scandalized by his private choices: In 1912 he eloped with the German Frieda Weekley, a married mother of three.Despite this, many critics took issue with what they saw as a morbid obsession with sex.His editor shortened the final draft by about one tenth, taking out some of the most suggestive passages, which were only restored in 1992.Believing in the supremacy of the flesh over the intellect, he elevated sex to a quasi-religious state.A keen student of Freud’s psychoanalysis, he used the Oedipal complex as an overarching theme.In the ground-breaking novel, published in 1913, the author tackled his own overly attached relationship to his mother.Only after his mother dies can he start his own life. He gets intellectual satisfaction from his childhood sweetheart Miriam, and finds sexual fulfillment with the married Clara. This keeps him from having healthy relationships with other women. Paul’s unhappily married mother chooses him to be her closest confidant.Lawrence’s first great novel, scandalized the public and established his reputation as an erotic writer. In this early 20th century masterpiece, the author described the effect of emotional alienation, broken dreams, borderline incestuous motherly love and repressed sexuality in a way that still resonates today – if only because we all can’t help being more or less damaged ourselves.
Yet none of that addresses his fundamental points.
Today some scholars snub their noses at him for being a reactionary misogynist.
Many of his contemporaries were aghast at the brutal realities and sexual liberties he described. In 1926, he wrote to a friend: “We can’t help being more or less damaged.” Sons and Lovers is his mostly autobiographical account of the damage done to him by an overbearing mother and underwhelming father, but also the damage he did to the women he engaged with. Lawrence remembered that his mother would collect him and his siblings to tell them spiteful horror stories about their father.
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