To explain what, exactly, is hard – but fortunately I am spared the task. In among the dross there are revelations, there are magnificent descriptions, there is writing of remarkable force and power. In spite of everything, I have to agree with Ford. As Lawrence tells the story, Ford shouted that remark to him on a London bus. Sons and Lovers has, as Ford Madox Ford famously said of The White Peacock, 'every fault that the English novel can have'. It would be possible to pick the novel apart in this manner for pages and pages. Was he? Where did that information come from? Why put it there? While I'm asking questions, why does Miriam so inevitably go on holiday with Paul's family, if they all hate her so much? Or at least, why isn't this explained? She was still a tomboy and she was engaged to be married.

Lawrence even makes similar bizarre, tangential announcements within the space of one paragraph: 'Annie, who had been teaching away, was at home again. Why, in fact, does Agatha wander on to the scene at all? She lasts all of three paragraphs before Lawrence is done with her forever. And she wanted herself to be a schoolteacher.' 'She had an elder sister Agatha, who was a schoolteacher. Is it acceptable, for instance, for Lawrence to spend 100-odd dull pages outlining apparently every detail about the workings of Miriam's family, only to announce out of the blue: The charge of sloppiness, however, still stands. Perhaps the fact that we can laugh at that swing scene now shows how effective his influence has been. But I do accept that Lawrence was treading new ground, pushing the novel into places it hadn't been before.

So long as we forget that Charles Dickens ever existed. Most importantly, there was something new in that he was a working-class man writing about a working-class man. I have also frequently read that there was something revolutionary about his attempt to give an emotional account of Paul – to get so deep inside the heart and mind of a working-class man. We are told Lawrence's raw, red-lipped (he's always talking about red lips!) sensuality, was something new in 1913. Some people love this book and will quite rightly disagree with me. Those two are matters of opinion, I know. That endless mithering, and picking at the same wound. That humourless striving for passion, that cold talk of 'fire'. Steady on!įor the second, I can moan about how often I've set the book down in despair, and about how much of a trudge it is. That's a description of Paul pushing Miriam on a rope swing. Again, firm and inevitable came the thrust at the right moment. Down to her bowels went the hot wave of fear. 'She felt the accuracy with which he caught her, exactly at the right moment, and the exactly proportionate strength of his thrust, and she was afraid.

And lovers dh lawrence