As the sensitive and delicate Gertrude begins to shrink from her drunken and violent husband, their marriage becomes a battleground. Gertrude turns increasingly towards her two eldest sons, William and Paul, and determines that they will not grow up to be coalminers living in poverty like their father. Yet soon William falls ill, and Paul seeks to escape his mother's suffocating influence through a series of relationships.

Closely autobiographical, and widely considered to be the first English novel with a truly working-class background, Sons and Lovers is the affecting portrait of a mining family torn apart by class divisions and the conflict between filial love and the urge to follow one's own desires.

The son of a coal miner, D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) was brought up in relative poverty, his working-class background providing inspiration for many of his early novels. Lawrence spent most of his adult life abroad in order to escape the conventions and hypocrisies of his own country, and advocated a return to a more harmonious relationship with nature in the face of modernity and industrialization. Controversial both during and after his lifetime, Lawrence's novels represent a milestone in twentieth-century literature.