Sons and Lovers

Part of Alma Classics’ Evergreens series of popular classics, Sons and Lovers is presented here with an extensive critical apparatus and extra material, including a section of photographs and notes.

As the sensitive and delicate Gertrude 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 considered to be the first English novel with a truly working-class background, 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.