Son and Lover

Lawrence's growth to maturity was a painful and traumatic business, the impulses of the young lover constantly thwarted by the self-doubt of the mother's son. Philip Callow captures the extraordinary drama of Lawrence's life from 1885, the year of his birth, to 1919 when he quit England. In rich and intimate detail, Mr. Callow recreates the half-rural, half-industrial world of the English Midlands where Lawrence grew up and which haunted his imagination all his life; he traces Lawrence's relationships with women, particularly his dominating mother, his first love Jessie Chambers, and earthy Frieda, his partner in a stormy marriage. And he shows how Lawrence was able to transmute the contradictions of his personality into the stuff of art. "A surprising tale of metamorphosis which Mr. Callow re-creates better than any previous Lawrence biographer." Julian Moynihan. "A happy balance of insight and sympathy.... His achievement is to let us see Lawrence's] impulses and passions from the inside." Margaret Drabble."