David Herbert Lawrence: Sons and Lovers / Women in Love

Taking its autobiographical inspiration from D.H. Lawrence´s experience of growing up in a coal-mining town, \"Sons and Lovers\" is a vivid account of the conflict between class, family and personal desires. The marriage of Gertrude and Walter Morel has become a battleground. Repelled by her uneducated and 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 is a highly autobiographical and compelling portrayal of childhood, adolescence and the clash of generations. Widely regarded as D. H. Lawrence´s greatest novel, \"Women in Love\" is both a lucid account of English society before the First World War and a brilliant evocation of the inexorable power of human desire. \"Women in Love\" continues where \"The Rainbow\" left off, with the third generation of Brangwens: Ursula Brangwen, now a teacher at Beldover, a mining town in the Midlands, and her sister Gudrun, who has returned from art school in London. The focus of the novel is primarily on their relationships, Ursula´s with Rupert Birkin, a school inspector, Gudrun´s with industrialist Gerald Crich, and later with a sculptor, Loerke. Quintessentially modernist, \"Women is Love\" is one of Lawrence´s most extraordinary, innovative and unsettling works.