Sons and Lovers

SONS AND LOVERS
THE MODERN LIBRARY
OF THE WORLD'S BEST BOOKS
The publishers will be pleased to send, upon request, an illustrated folder setting forth the purpose and scope of THE MODERN LIBRARY, and listing each volume in the series. Every reader of books will find titles he has been looking for, handsomely printed, in unabridged editions, and at an unusually low price.
BY D. H. LAWRENCE
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JOHN MACY
THE MODERN LIBRARY · NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT. 1913. BY THOMAS SELTZER, INC. INTRODUCTION COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY BONI AND LIVERIGHT

An introduction to this book is as superfluous as a candle in front of a searchlight. But a convention of publishing seems to require that the candle should be there, and I am proud to be the one to hold it. About ten years ago I picked up from the pile of new books on my desk a copy of Sons and Lovers by a man of whom I had never heard, and I started to race through it with the immoral speed of the professional reviewer. But after a page or two I found myself reading, really reading. Here was—here is—a masterpiece in which every sentence counts, a book crammed with significant thought and beautiful, arresting phrases, the work of a singular genius whose gifts are more richly various than those of any other young English novelist.
To appreciate the rich variety of Mr. Lawrence we must read his later novels and his volumes of poetry. But Sons and Lovers reveals the range of his power. Here are combined and fused the hardest sort of realism and almost lyric imagery and rhythm. The speech of the people is that of daily life and the things that happen to them are normal adventures and accidents; they fall in love, marry, work, fail, succeed, die. But of their deeper emotions and of the relations of these little human beings to the earth and to the stars Mr. Lawrence makes something as near to poetry as prose dare be without violating its proper other harmony.
Take the marvellous paragraph on next to the last page (Mr. Lawrence depends so little on plot in the ordinary sense of the word that it is perfectly fair to read the end of his book first):