Sons and Lovers
A young man in a Nottinghamshire mining town grows up between a mother who loves him too much and a father who works underground. Lawrence based the novel on his own childhood, and the early chapters about the mines and the house are among the best things he wrote.
The book is often read as autobiography, and it is also a study of how a family's love can become a form of possession. The prose is direct and physical in a way that was new in English fiction. The last third is more theoretical than the first, but the whole book has an unusual intensity.
Public-domain status
First published in 1913. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; D. H. Lawrence died in 1930, so this work has been free to republish there since 2001.
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