If You Want to Feel Depressed, Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence is Perfect.
Exquisite writing, sharply delineated characterizations, beautiful descriptions of nature. What more could you want? They’re all there in Lawrence’s great novel of class-distinction, and thwarted love, Sons and Lovers. Set in a grim town beset with coal-dust and smoke in Yorkshire, Mrs Morel, the mother-in-law from hell, who focuses all of her attention on her clever and artistic son Paul, dominates this novel. She marries a man who is somewhat beneath her when she is quite young, and when the book begins, her coal-miner husband realises that he is not good enough for this driven, ambitious woman who comes from a better class, and feels abandoned by her stifling love for her children, so he gets drunk and beats her. It is arguable that Lawrence would have wanted readers to think that she provokes him at the time when this book was written, however. He manages to make you feel sympathetic with both parents, a difficult feat! Paul, her sensitive, creative son, based heavily on...
