Sons and Lovers

A Nottinghamshire miner, the wife who has decided her sons will not go down the pit, and the son caught between her and two women his own age. Lawrence wrote it in the two years after his mother's death and called it the tragedy of thousands of young men in England. His publisher cut a tenth of it as too frank. Fifty-eight plates of mill and hearth by painters including Gustav Wentzel and John Atkinson Grimshaw carry the novel's mining-village rooms and watermills alongside the text.