had carved a half lie from an honest portrayal of his childhood. He saw what he had written as a novel, not a case history, and considered the text universal, a representation of “the tragedy of thousands of young men in England” (from the Garnett letter of November 1912). Later, in 1921, he published an anti-Freudian tract titled Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious.

However, Lawrence admitted in various letters that he had loved his mother like a lover. He wrote descriptions of Mrs. Lawrence as if he were writing about a girlfriend: “She is my first, great love. She was a wonderful, rare woman—you do not know; as strong, and steadfast, and generous as the sun. She could be as swift as a white whiplash, and as kind and gentle as warm rain, and as steadfast as the irreducible earth beneath us,” he wrote to Louise Burrows in December 1910, on the eve of his mother’s death (Letters). In the same month he wrote to Rachel Ann and Taylor, “This has been a kind of bond between me and my mother. We have loved each other, almost with a husband and wife love, as well as filial and maternal.” Later in the same letter he wrote, “Nobody can have the soul of me. My mother has had it, and nobody can have it again. Nobody can come into my very self again, and breath me like an atmosphere” (Letters).

This, then, is the setting for the composition of Sons and Lovers. A remarkably gifted young man, tragically stifled under both the yoke of his mother’s love and the weight of Victorian morals, conceives of an autobiographical novel that will stick to the facts of his upbringing. Eastwood, the rundown though respectable mining town where Lawrence was born, changes to Bestwood. Lydia Lawrence, his mother, changes to Gertrude Morel. And Lawrence, with little change, renames himself Paul.

Lawrence based the character Miriam on Jessie Chambers, the doe-eyed, spiritual girl with whom he developed a friendship to rival any in fiction. “When we were alone together we were in a world apart, where feeling and thought were intense, and we seemed to touch a reality that was beyond the ordinary workaday world,” Chambers writes in her book (Chambers, p. 58). As in the novel, Chambers lived with her family on a farm a few miles away from the town. Lawrence, a year her senior, first came to the farm with his mother. Their relationship progressed in much the same way as Paul and Miriam’s. Lawrence frequently visited the farm, spending all day with the family, playing with the brothers, talking with the mother and father. When not at the farm, Lawrence wrote letters; at first he addressed them to the whole Chambers family, then gradually he addressed them only to Jessie. Their relationship developed slowly. Before they knew it, their lives were intertwined.

Lawrence left school at sixteen and took a job at a Nottingham company that manufactured medical supplies. After a brush with pneumonia and a long convalescence, he quit the job and started to work as a student teacher. He read everything he could get his hands on and, with Chambers at his side, explored the halls of the Eastwood library. The pair would leave the library literally burdened with books, their pockets stuffed with them. Ford Madox Ford once said that Lawrence was the only man he knew who read everything he claimed to have read. Chambers read alongside him. Books became their common ground.

They subjected their reading list to intense scrutiny, discussing the characters during long walks, trying to understand how a novel is constructed. Lawrence was not in the least academic in his approach. He personalized his reading, placing himself within the context of the fiction, trying on various philosophies and approaches as if they were shirts. He began to talk definitely of becoming a writer and, scribbling on scraps of paper wherever he could find them, undertook the task of becoming a poet.

Chambers was, in many ways, Lawrence’s first literary agent. In 1909, after Lawrence became frustrated at some initial rejection slips and declared he would never send off his work again, Chambers submitted three of his poems to The English Review with a letter to the editor, Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford), expressing her admiration for the poems and for the poet. Hueffer was impressed with the poems and offered to publish them. He also wanted to meet the poet, fancying himself a great discoverer of upcoming literary talent, and