Paul Morel

Description

This early version of Sons and Lovers, Lawrence's highly popular autobiographical novel, has never been published before. Amongst all the surviving early drafts of Lawrence's works this is the most different from the final version; as he rewrote, Lawrence discarded many episodes, some of them stories from his childhood not recorded anywhere else. It is less polished than Sons and Lovers, but it is full of powerful, spontaneous, dramatic writing: there is more humour and charm, more raw violence and nervous energy. This volume also contains remarkable documents written by Lawrence's girlfriend Jessie Chambers, the model for Miriam in Paul Morel and in Sons and Lovers, in which she gives Lawrence some hostile criticisms and writes out for him her own versions of some of his episodes. In addition there is a fragment of a novel about his mother's childhood, facsimiles of manuscript pages, maps, and scholarly notes and apparatus.

Helen Baron is Research Fellow in the Department of English at Hull. She is author of D. H. Lawrence: Writing the Body (1991), and has written on Lawrence in a wide range of journals.

'... what delights ... how worth reading and treasuring Paul Morel is.' Independent on Sunday 'Helen Baron's editorial work is, as usual with this series, impeccable.' English Studies