Sons and Lovers: David Lawrence

As the sensitive and delicate Gertrude Morel begins to shrink from her drunken and violent husband, their marriage becomes a battleground. Gertrude turns increasingly towards her two eldest sons, William and Paul, and determines that they will not grow up to be coal miners living in poverty like their father. Yet soon William falls ill, and Paul seeks to escape his mother’s suffocating influence through a series of relationships.

Closely autobiographical, and widely regarded as Lawrence’s finest achievement, Sons and Lovers is the affecting portrait of a mining family torn apart by class divisions and the conflict between filial love and the urge to follow one’s own desires.