Sons and Lovers - Abridged

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.