Gertrude Morel no longer loved her husband. She had not wanted this child and there it lay in her arms and pulled at her heart. It had come into the world unloved. She would love it all the more, now that it was here. Gertrude Morel is poor and unhappily married. Her husband Walter is rough and insensitive, spending much of his free time in the pub. Mrs Morel turns instead to her children, especially her three sons. At first William, the eldest, is her favourite. But things happen, and Mrs Morel turns all her love and attention to Paul, the second son. This moving story describes family life in a coalminer's family in the early twentieth century. It also describes the emotional development of Paul, torn between his passionate love for his mother and his romantic friendships with two young women, Miriam and Clara. David Herbert Lawrence was born near Nottingham in 1885, the fourth of five children. He trained as a school teacher and taught at a school in the south of England for three years. In 1911, his first novel, The White Peacock, came out. In the same year his mother died and he gave up teaching because of ill health. He went to Germany and Italy with Frieda Weckley, a married woman whom he married on his return to England in 1914. Lawrence was now a full-time professional writer. Unhappy in England, where he was criticised for opposing the First World War and for the sexual openness of his books, Lawrence spent most of his time abroad with Frieda. He died in the south of France in 1930, aged forty-four.