Helen Baron – författare

The marriage of Gertrude and Walter Morel has become a battleground. Repelled by her uneducated and sometimes violent husband, delicate Gertrude devotes her life to her children, especially to her sons, William and Paul - determined they will not follow their father into working down the coal mines. But conflict is evitable when Paul seeks to escape his mother's suffocating grasp through relationships with women his own age. Set in Lawrence's native Nottinghamshire, Sons and Lovers (1913) is a highly autobiographical and compelling portrayal of childhood, adolescence and the clash of generations.

This is the first ever edition of the early version of Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence's highly popular autobiographical novel. Amongst all the surviving early drafts of Lawrence's works this is the most different from the final version; as he rewrote, Lawrence discarded many episodes, some of them stories from his childhood not recorded anywhere else. It is less polished than Sons and Lovers, but it is full of powerful, spontaneous, dramatic writing: there is more humour and charm, more raw violence and nervous energy. This volume also contains remarkable documents written by Lawrence's girlfriend Jessie Chambers, the model for Miriam in Paul Morel and in Sons and Lovers, in which she gives Lawrence some hostile criticisms and writes out for him her own versions of some of his episodes. In addition there is a fragment of a novel about his mother's childhood, facsimiles of manuscript pages, maps, and scholarly notes and apparatus.

This is the first ever edition of the early version of Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence's highly popular autobiographical novel. Amongst all the surviving early drafts of Lawrence's works this is the most different from the final version; as he rewrote, Lawrence discarded many episodes, some of them stories from his childhood not recorded anywhere else. It is less polished than Sons and Lovers, but it is full of powerful, spontaneous, dramatic writing: there is more humour and charm, more raw violence and nervous energy. This volume also contains remarkable documents written by Lawrence's girlfriend Jessie Chambers, the model for Miriam in Paul Morel and in Sons and Lovers, in which she gives Lawrence some hostile criticisms and writes out for him her own versions of some of his episodes. In addition there is a fragment of a novel about his mother's childhood, facsimiles of manuscript pages, maps, and scholarly notes and apparatus.

Sons and Lovers is D. H. Lawrence's most widely read novel and one of the great works of twentieth-century literature. In 1913, at the time of its first publication, Lawrence reluctantly agreed to the removal of no fewer than eighty passages which until now have never been restored. This edition presents the novel in the form that Lawrence himself wanted - about one tenth longer than the incomplete and expurgated version that has hitherto been available. The introduction of this edition relates much new information about Lawrence's two-year struggle to write his autobiographical masterpiece. The notes document many previously unknown sources, and indicate Lawrence's preoccupation with key contemporary issues such as women's rights, and the impact of evolutionary theory on religion and ethics.