It traces emotional conflicts through the protagonist, Paul Morel, and his suffocating relationships with a demanding mother and two very different lovers, which exert complex influences on the development of his manhood.

And it was from then that he met Frieda Richthofen, and around this time that he began conceiving his two other great novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love, which had more sexual emphasis and maturity.

The third published novel of D. H. Lawrence, taken by many to be his earliest masterpiece, tells the story of Paul Morel, a young man and budding artist.

Letters written around the time of its development clearly demonstrate the admiration he felt for his mother – viewing her as a 'clever, ironical, delicately moulded woman' – and her apparently unfortunate marriage to his coal-miner father, a man of 'sanguine temperament' and instability.

The penultimate draft of the novel coincided with a remarkable change in Lawrence's life, as his health was thrown into turmoil and he resigned his teaching job to spend time in Germany.

In addition to altering the title to a more thematic 'Sons and Lovers', Heinemann's response had reinvigorated Lawrence into vehemently defending his novel and its themes as a coherent work of art.

To justify its form, Lawrence explains, in letters to Garnett, that it is a 'great tragedy' and a 'great book', one that mirrors the 'tragedy of thousands of young men in England'.

At Miriam's family's farm, Paul meets Clara Dawes, a young woman with, apparently, feminist sympathies who has separated from her husband, Baxter.

Lawrence summarised the plot in a letter to Edward Garnett on 19 November 1912: Jenny Turner described Sons and Lovers as a semi-autobiographical work in The Sexual Imagination from Acker to Zola: A Feminist Companion (1993).

[9] Sons and Lovers has been adapted for the screen several times including the Academy Award winning 1960 film, a 1981 BBC TV serial and another on ITV1 in 2003.