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COPYRIGHT 2005 ELT Press
D. H. Lawrence. Paul Morel. Helen Baron, ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. lviii + 324 pp. $100
MY unqualified congratulations to Cambridge University Press for the publication of Paul Morel, a volume that sets a new standard for accessible and provocative source material amid the already well-established record of excellence permeating the litany of Cambridge's definitive editions of D.H. Lawrence's prolific work. The book is impressively edited by Helen Baron, who provides a lengthy and incisive introduction that encompasses this lively and poignant early version of Sons and Lovers, in addition to important correlative documents in an intelligently conceived volume that includes fragments from the later third draft of the novel, and short episodes from this penultimate manuscript that were rewritten by Jessie Chambers, who hoped "to influence [Lawrence] into giving a kinder representation of herself and their teenage romance."
Because the characterization of Mrs. Morel remains so crucial to the situational context of Paul Morel and to Lawrence's conflicted perspective on his own mother, Baron wisely includes an evocative piece of fifteen pages from a novel planned by Lawrence on his mother's childhood that was to be called Matilda and was initiated about the time that he began to write Paul Morel. Although Lawrence never finished this ambitious work, in my reading of the preserved fragment it is notable both for its depiction of Matilda's powerful will and confidence (as a mere pre-adolescent) when she expresses her reluctance to kiss the parson, and of the conditioned hate for her father that she learns from her mother. As I later note in this review, it is precisely these elements in the short excerpt from Matilda--an awe over the mother's power and a contempt for the father's weakness--that receive significant emphases in the characterization of the parents in Paul Morel. Unlike other Cambridge editions of earlier versions of major Lawrence works that generally avoid editorial judgments about the quality of the variant drafts, Baron remains persuasive and...
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