Sons and lovers

Gertrude Morel, a delicate yet determined woman, no longer loves her boorish, inarticulate husband and devotes herself to her sons William and Paul. Inevitably there is conflict when Paul falls in love and seeks to escape his mother's suffocating grasp. Set in the period leading up to the First World War, Lawrence's modern masterpiece reflects the problems of transition between the agricultural past and the industrial future, between one generation and the next, and between childhood and adolescence. The Cambridge D. H. Lawrence edition of Sons and Lovers contains the complete, restored text which was first published in 1992 and is a tenth longer than previous editions. 'The closeness and richness of experience... comes fizzing out of words and pages.' John Bayley, London Review of Books