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other faults. It has no particular shape and no recognizable plot; themes are casually taken up, and then as casually dropped, and there seems no reason why they should have been taken up unless they were to be kept up. Everything that happens is an extraordinarily long time about it, and sometimes it takes a very long time for nothing at all to happen. Faults like these ought to swamp any virtues the book may possess; set them down in this abstract fashion, and it seems incredible that Sons and Lovers can be anything but a dull success of cleverness. So, perhaps, it would be, if Mr. Lawrence were simply a novelist. But he is a poet, one of the most remarkable poets of the day; and these faults of his are actually of no more account than the soot of a brilliant, vehement flame. Indeed, you do not realize how astonishingly interesting the whole book is until you find yourself protesting that this thing or that thing bores you, and eagerly reading on in spite of your protestations. You decide that the old collier, the father, is a dirty brute; and then perceive that he profoundly has your sympathy. The mother is a creature of superb and lovable heroism; and yet there is no doubt that she is sometimes downright disagreeable. You think you are reading through an unimportant scene; and then find that is has burnt itself on your mind. The ’Odi et amo’ of the main theme, in fact, is only an exaggerated instance of the quality which runs through the whole book, which may be best described as contrary, in the sense the word has when it rhymes with Mary. Life, for Mr. Lawrence, is a coin which has both obverse and reverse; so it is for most people, but his unusual art consists in his surprising ability to illuminate both sides simultaneously. The scope and variety of the life he describes, his understanding and vivid realizing of circumstance and his insight into character, and chiefly his power of lighting a train of ordinary events to blaze up into singular significance, make Sons and Lovers stand out from the fiction of the day as an achievement of the first quality.

—from the Manchester Guardian (July 2, 1913)

The New York Times

There is probably no phrase much more hackneyed than that of “human document,” yet it is the only one which at all describes this very unusual book. It is hardly a story; rather the first part of a man’s life, from his birth until his 25th year, the conditions surrounding him, his strength and his numerous weaknesses, put before us in a manner which misses no subtlest effect either of emotion or environment. And the heroine of the book is not sweetheart, but mother; the mother with whose marriage the novel begins, with whose pathetic death it reaches its climax. The love for each other of the mother and her son, Paul Morel, is the mainspring of both their lives; it is portrayed tenderly, yet with a truthfulness which slurs nothing even of that friction which is unavoidable between members of two different generations.... It is wonderfully real, this daily life of the Morel family and the village wherein they lived as reflected in Mr. Lawrence’s pages; the more real because he never flaunts his knowledge of the intimate details of the existence led by these households whose men folk toil underground. They slip from his pen so unobtrusively that it is only when we pause and consider that we recognize how full and complete is the background against which he projects his principal characters—Mr. and Mrs. Morel, Paul, Miriam, and Clara.

Paul himself is a person who awakens interest rather than sympathy ; it is difficult not to despise him a little for his weakness, his constant need—of that strengthening he sought from two other women, but which only his splendid, indomitable little mother could give him—a fact of which he was constantly aware, though he acknowledged it only at the very end. And it is not easy upon any grounds to excuse his treatment of Miriam, even though it was a spiritual self-defense which urged him to disloyalty. Mr. Lawrence has small regard for what we term conventional morality;