Sons and Lovers & Women in Love (2 Books in 1)

Taking its autobiographical inspiration from D.H. Lawrence's experience of growing up in a coal-mining town, "Sons and Lovers" is a vivid account of the conflict between class, family and personal desires. The marriage of Gertrude and Walter Morel has become a battleground. Repelled by her uneducated and 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.

Widely regarded as D. H. Lawrence's greatest novel, "Women in Love" is both a lucid account of English society before the First World War, and a brilliant evocation of the inexorable power of human desire. "Women in Love" continues where "The Rainbow" left off, with the third generation of Brangwens: Ursula Brangwen, now a teacher at Beldover, a mining town in the Midlands, and her sister Gudrun, who has returned from art school in London. The focus of the novel is primarily on their relationships, Ursula's with Rupert Birkin, a school inspector, and Gudrun's with industrialist Gerald Crich, and later with a sculptor, Loerke. Quintessentially modernist, "Women is Love" is one of Lawrence's most extraordinary, innovative and unsettling works.