ABSTRACT
Sons and Lovers is too well known to need detailed discussion. But because I have approached the book from the standpoint of Lawrence's personal biography, it is especially necessary to stress at the outset that what Lawrence wrote is a remarkable and fascinating work of fiction which resists all attempts (and there have been several) to shrink it down so that it is no more than a record of its author's psychological problems. One could say that the novel begins with the author's problems but does not end with them. It opens out into the reader's world, illuminating and enhancing it by the depth of its insight and the steady honesty of its vision. ‘One sheds one's sicknesses in books,’ Lawrence once wrote, and did himself less than justice by the implication of an inert casting off of psychological disturbances into fiction. What we find in Sons and Lovers, if we read it without too many preconceptions, is not the passive expression of emotional entanglements as so many involuntary and inescapable symptoms, but the decisive mastery of them into a shaped and shapely work of fiction.
