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obvious mental, emotional, and spiritual connection between the two, Lawrence’s mother disapproved of Chambers. Her antipathy created an atmosphere so charged (Chambers described it as “strung-up” and “tight”) that the girl grew to dislike visiting the Lawrence home. Though Lawrence and Chambers avoided the topic of romance and sex, the issue asserted itself Mrs. Lawrence forced the question upon her son, and Lawrence, bringing the moment to its crisis, talked to Chambers. He told her that he could not bring himself to love her as “a man should love a wife” because, as he explained, between mother love and romantic love, the blood tie was the stronger of the two. “I can’t make myself love you, can I?” he cruelly asked Chambers. “I can’t plant a little love-tree in my heart” (Chambers, p. 141). The situation, as Chambers described it, was simply that while loving his mother with an almost romantic passion, he had nothing left to give a lover. “They tore me from you, the love of my life,” Lawrence remorsefully wrote to Chambers in a letter from March 1911. “It was the slaughter of the fetus in the womb” (Letters).

Mrs. Lawrence grew fatally ill with cancer during the fall and winter of 1910 as Lawrence’s first novel went into its final proofing stage. She died before she saw the novel in print. Lost in the world without his mother, Lawrence passed into a period of hopelessness and despair. Her death, he wrote, had taken from him all his spontaneous capacity for joy. “The only antidote is work,” he wrote in a letter to his sister in March 1911. “Heaven’s—how I do but slog. It gets the days over, at any rate” (Letters).

Lawrence was not content with his first book. “Publishers take no notice of a first novel. They know that nearly anybody can write one novel, if he can write at all, because it’s about himself. A second novel’s a step further.” The Trespasser, his second novel, was published in 1912. “It’s the third that counts, though.... If [a novelist] can get over that ass’s bridge he’s a writer, he can go on” (Chambers, p. 189).

Lawrence conceived of Sons and Lovers, originally titled “Paul Morel,” during his mother’s sickness. With her death, he began working at it with a vengeance. He had mixed feelings about it and the progress he was making. “I am afraid it will be a terrible novel,” he wrote to Louise Burrows in March 1911. “But if I can keep it to my idea and feeling, it will be a great one” (Letters). In a different letter from the same month, he wrote Helen Corke, “Glory you should see [my novel]. The British public will stone me if ever it catches sight” (Letters).

Chambers and Lawrence had little contact during this time. She felt, however, that the writing of this third novel would allow Lawrence to work out his conflicting impulses, his loyalty to his mother on one side and his desire for romantic love on the other. She hoped that, through the expurgating process of writing, he could break the stifling maternal bond. She encouraged Lawrence to finish his book, hoping that, once free, he would finally be able to turn his romantic love to her.

So Lawrence wrote and Chambers waited. But as the pages of the manuscript came to her, she was horribly disappointed. “The shock of Sons and Lovers gave the death-blow to our friendship,” Chambers wrote (p. 202). The break came in the treatment of Miriam. Far from allowing Lawrence to see his way out of the painful double bind, the novel, as Chambers interpreted it, handed the laurels of victory to his mother. “He had to present a distorted picture of our association so that the martyr’s halo might sit becomingly on his mother’s brow,” Chambers wrote (p. 203). Chambers, disappointed and horrified, offered Lawrence few criticisms and broke off all but the most necessary contact.

Lawrence, who once wrote that he was incapable of standing in the world without a woman beside him, soon found Frieda Weekley, a woman he described as earthy, elemental, and passionate. She was older than he; she was married to his professor; she had three children. Even so, Lawrence convinced