Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 Bert and Jessie, 1901–1909
- 2 ‘The Saga of Siegmund’ and the Test on Lawrence, 1909–1910
- 3 ‘Paul Morel I’ and the Death of Lydia Lawrence, August–December 1910
- 4 Betrothal and ‘Paul Morel II’, January–October 1911
- 5 Re-enter Jessie, 1911–1912
- 6 ‘The death-blow to our friendship’, ‘Paul Morel III’, February–June 1912
- 7 From ‘Paul Morel’ to Sons and Lovers, July–November 1912
- 8 Epilogue, 1912–1913
- Bibliography
- Endnotes
- Index
1 - Bert and Jessie, 1901–1909
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 Bert and Jessie, 1901–1909
- 2 ‘The Saga of Siegmund’ and the Test on Lawrence, 1909–1910
- 3 ‘Paul Morel I’ and the Death of Lydia Lawrence, August–December 1910
- 4 Betrothal and ‘Paul Morel II’, January–October 1911
- 5 Re-enter Jessie, 1911–1912
- 6 ‘The death-blow to our friendship’, ‘Paul Morel III’, February–June 1912
- 7 From ‘Paul Morel’ to Sons and Lovers, July–November 1912
- 8 Epilogue, 1912–1913
- Bibliography
- Endnotes
- Index
Summary
Towards the end of 1912, his long and tormented relationship with Jessie Chambers (Figure 1) finally behind him, beginning his new life with Frieda Weekley on the shore of Lake Garda, in the final draft of Sons and Lovers Lawrence imagined the first meeting of Paul Morel and Miriam Leivers, based on his first meeting with Jessie eleven years earlier. He wrote, ‘She seemed to be in some way scornful of the boy. “She thinks I'm common,” he thought.’ One might think that he was a reliable witness to his adolescent experience, but he changed his account to: ‘She seemed to be in some way resentful of the boy. “He thinks I'm only a common girl,” she thought’ (MS185). From the very start Lawrence imagines contradictory versions of his relationship with the most important person, apart from his mother, in the first twenty-six years of his life.
There might have been reasons for either young person—aged fifteen and fourteen at this first meeting—to think that the other felt socially superior. Their mothers had met at the Congregational church in Eastwood, a centre for the aspiring working class, where they found ‘a degree of culture that was otherwise entirely lacking in their lives’, which put them on a footing of equality. But Lawrence's father was a nearly illiterate coal miner, and the family lived in a terraced house in town, which he may have felt was a stigma when he entered the cottage, however modest, covered in Virginia creeper and honeysuckle, where Jessie's farming family lived. He probably did not know then that two of her brothers worked down the pit to supplement the family income. The farm, with its horses, dog and pigs, the woods through which he walked the two miles from Eastwood to reach it, which came almost up to the garden fence, and the whole family—the mother, father and sons as much as Jessie herself—were deeply attractive to him, and were to become a second home in the seven years before he left Eastwood.
But Jessie certainly felt inferior to Lawrence. He was a scholarship boy at Nottingham High School, whereas her ‘lack of education was a bitter humiliation’ to her (ET 23).
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- Sons and LoversThe Biography of a Novel</I>, pp. 7 - 32Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2016