Sons and Lovers

D. H. Lawrence

Sep 2012 · Penguin · Narrated by Paul Copley

About this audiobook

Penguin Classics presents D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, adapted for audio and available as a digital download as part of the Penguin English Library series. Read by Paul Copley.

'"She was a brazen hussy."
"She wasn't. - And she was pretty, wasn't she?"
"I didn't look ... And tell your girls, my son, that when they're running after you, they're not to come and ask your mother for you - tell them that - brazen baggages you meet at dancing classes"'

The marriage of Gertrude and Walter Morel has become a battleground. Repelled by her uneducated and sometimes violent husband, delicate Gertrude devotes her life to her children, especially to her sons, William and Paul - determined they will not follow their father into working down the coal mines. But conflict is evitable when Paul seeks to escape his mother's suffocating grasp through relationships with women his own age. Set in Lawrence's native Nottinghamshire, Sons and Lovers is a highly autobiographical and compelling portrayal of childhood, adolescence and the clash of generations.

Part of a series of vintage recordings taken from the Penguin Archives. Affordable, collectable, quality productions - perfect for on-the-go listening.

About the author

D. H. Lawrence was born in 1885 into a poor working class family in a coal mining village in Nottinghamshire. The fourth child of a schoolmistress and little-educated miner, his working class upbringing, fraught relationship with his father and very close bond with his mother informed the semi-autobiographical Sons and Lovers. Lawrence started his career teaching, and it was Ford Madox Ford who first noticed Lawrence's talent when he saw some of his poetry in 1908. He went on to become a prolific novelist, playwright, essayist and literary critic as well as poet, and having eloped with his professor's wife Frieda, spent the majority of his life travelling with her in a sort of self-imposed exile, through places as diverse as Australia, Italy, Bavaria and Sri Lanka. His writing often met with shock and moral outrage, and thirty years after his young death at the age of forty-four, Penguin was trialled under the Obscene Publications Act for publishing the unabridged Lady Chatterley's Lover. Penguin dedicated the second edition of the book to 'the twelve jurors, three women and nine men, who returned a verdict of "Not Guilty" and thus made D. H. Lawrence's last novel available for the first time'. Sons and Lovers was first published in 1913.