Why this book

When it appeared in 1913, this novel shocked England with its frankness about desire and the family. Lawrence gave literature its first great portrait of a son bound to his mother, the story Freud's followers would call the Oedipus complex, told not as theory but as flesh and grief.

The Story

Gertrude Coppard was a proud, educated woman who longed for something warmer than her stiff upbringing. Therefore, when she met Walter Morel, a black-haired miner who danced and laughed like living fire, she married him gladly, certain his warmth would be enough to build a life upon.

But the fire soon cooled. Walter drank away his wages and lied about the little house being his own, and when Gertrude discovered his debts and his temper, her love curdled into contempt. Therefore she turned away from her husband and began, instead, to live for her children.

In the worst years, Walter would stumble home drunk and rage, and once he flung a drawer that cut Gertrude's brow till the blood dripped onto her baby. Therefore the children learned to dread their father's step on the path, and drew ever tighter around their wounded, unbending mother.

The Morels lived by the rhythm of the pit. Each dawn Walter descended into the black earth to hew coal, returning grimed and spent. The family scraped by on little, counting every coin. Paul came to hate the mine that hardened his father, even as it fed them all.

Her firstborn, William, became her champion. He was quick, handsome, and adoring, and therefore she fed all her thwarted hope into him. When he won a fine clerk's post in London, she glowed with pride, yet ached, for the city was carrying her golden boy away.

In London, William chased money and a shallow society girl he could not afford. He overworked himself thin, until a sudden fever took hold and burned through him. Within days he was dead. His mother came home hollowed out, but her grief had nowhere to go, until it found her second son.

That son was Paul. Sickly and shy as a boy, he had always watched his mother with worship. Therefore, when she nearly lost him too to pneumonia, she clutched him back from death by sheer will, and from that night, mother and son were bound soul to soul.

Paul grew into a gentle, artistic young man who painted in his spare hours. To help feed the family, he took a clerk's job at a surgical-appliance factory in Nottingham, riding the train each morning. But his real life was elsewhere, in his painting, and always, always in his mother.

Mother and son shared everything, his paintings, his wages, his every hope. They walked out together like sweethearts, and Gertrude drank in his triumphs as if they were her own. Yet this very closeness, so warm and so complete, was quietly binding Paul in a cord he could not cut.

At a nearby farm lived Miriam Leivers, a dark, intense girl who read poetry and prayed over everything she loved. Paul was drawn to her burning inner life, and therefore they walked the fields for hours, sharing books and God and beauty, their two souls straining toward each other.

But his mother watched Miriam with cold dread. She saw the girl reaching for the deepest part of Paul, the part she believed was hers, and therefore she grew bitter. She wants to suck the soul out of him, Gertrude thought, and Paul, torn, began to resent Miriam for the love he could not fully give.

For years Paul and Miriam circled each other, half in love, half at war. At last they became lovers, but the joy he hoped for never came. He felt Miriam only endured him, sacrificing herself like a martyr rather than wanting him. Therefore, wounded and cruel, Paul broke it off.

Yet leaving Miriam did not free him. Some invisible thread still tied them, and he came back, and hurt her, and left again, hating himself. Miriam bore it all with a patient, wounded devotion, which only made Paul feel more trapped. He needed a love that asked nothing of his soul.

Then came Clara Dawes, married, separated from her husband, proud and openly sensual. She worked among the factory girls and moved with a bold, defiant beauty. Where Miriam had offered Paul her spirit, Clara offered him her body, and therefore he plunged into a passionate, physical affair with her.

Clara was no meek country girl. She marched with the suffragettes, spoke her mind, and had walked out on her own husband rather than be owned. In her Paul found a woman fully awake to her own desire, and for a while, her fierce freedom set his blood alight.

For a time their desire felt like enough. But even in Clara's arms, Paul remained half-absent, unable to give her his whole heart. She sensed it and grew unhappy, saying he took her yet never truly belonged to her. Therefore, this love too began to thin and fail.

Meanwhile Clara's estranged husband, Baxter Dawes, a brawny, bitter man, learned of the affair. He cornered Paul and beat him savagely in the dark. But later, when Dawes fell gravely ill and alone, Paul astonished everyone: he nursed his rival back to health and quietly pushed Clara toward reconciling with her husband.

Through all of this, one bond never loosened: Paul and his mother. But now Gertrude fell ill with a cancer that would not be denied. Paul cared for her through months of slow agony, watching the fierce woman who had shaped his whole soul wither slowly toward the grave.

For long weeks Paul scarcely left her side. He gave her the morphia, propped her pillows, and listened to her labored breathing in the dark. He watched the strong, sharp-tongued mother of his childhood shrink to a wisp of a woman, and knew, with dread, that his whole world was dying with her.

Her suffering became unbearable, and still she would not die. Therefore Paul and his sister Annie made a terrible choice: they crushed her sleeping-morphine into a final, deadly dose of milk. That night the tormented woman slipped away at last, and Paul had killed the one person he loved most, to set her free.

With his mother gone, Paul came apart. She had been his center, his north, and without her the whole world went grey and meaningless. He drifted through the days like a shadow, drawn again and again toward the darkness, half-wishing he could simply follow her down into death.

Miriam found him there and quietly offered marriage, a safe harbor. But Paul understood that to take her now would be to surrender, to let himself be swallowed. Therefore he refused. Alone, hollowed, yet unbroken, he turned his back on the darkness and walked toward the glowing lights of the living town.

What it means

Lawrence saw that love and possession can be the same hunger, and that a devotion which will not let go can cripple the beloved. Paul's whole journey is the fight to become his own man. In the end, as Lawrence wrote, 'He walked towards the faintly humming, glowing town, quickly', choosing, at last, life.

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