sons and lovers
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D. H. Lawrence is considered one of the Twentieth Century's greatest and most visionary English novelists. He was born in 1885 in Eastwood, a mining community in Nottinghamshire, England (DeMott iii). His father was an uneducated miner and his mother had been a schoolteacher before she married. According to England's rigid class system, his mother's marriage to his father was considered a step down, since she came from a well-educated middle-class family. Thus the vast differences between his parents was cause for "the fabric of his parents' marriage [to be] ripped by bitterness, violence and hate" (DeMott vii).
Lawrence's first great novel, Sons and Lovers, is clearly autobiographical: "there's no denying the closeness of the resemblance between Paul Morel's life and that of his creator" (DeMott vii). The novel tells the story of Gertrude Morel, a mother whose possessive love for her sons hinders their ability to establish fulfilling relationships with other women. Lawrence himself had an unusually close attachment to his mother...