Sons and Lovers

Mr. Morel locks his wife out on a summer night after a drunken quarrel, and Gertrude stands alone in the garden, breathing in the scent of the tall white lilies until she and the unborn child inside her seem to melt together into the moonlight, one nervous, aching sensitivity already shared before he is even born. That child is Paul, and D. H. Lawrence follows him into manhood in a Nottinghamshire coal town, where his mother's thwarted hopes fasten onto him so completely that neither Miriam's tenderness nor Clara's hunger can ever claim him. This is the exact anatomy of a love that gives everything and asks everything back, of a son who cannot leave even when he tries. When cancer finally takes his mother, it is Paul who measures the morphine into her milk and sits with her until she goes still. What is left, on the last page, is a young man walking off the dark fields toward a town glowing faintly against the sky, choosing, for once, to walk toward the light instead of away from it.