The new direction in which Lawrence moves in Sons and Lovers may not be immediately clear. That the novel is longer than the first two, more obviously autobiographical, does not make it an innovatory work. Indeed, the element of self-exploration makes it in one respect a very traditional kind of novel – the Bildungsroman attempted by many romantic artists. Its confidence, intensity and strange mixture of self-mistrust and self-knowledge does, however, mark a new stage in Lawrence's writing. He dramatized much of his early life in this novel – his family background, his education, his first sexual relationships – but he always kept before himself the need to create a work of the imagination. Sons and Lovers is a great work of self-analysis by a young writer looking back on the recent years of growing up: but it is always first and foremost a novel, not an autobiography.

Lawrence establishes an honesty of method right at the start. ‘“The Bottoms” succeeded to “Hell Row” (p. 7). Visitors to Eastwood can still see the streets to which the opening paragraph of Sons and Lovers refers, and drive round the pock-marked countryside where the coalpits, ‘some of which had been worked in the time of Charles II’ (p. 8), bear witness to the struggle for survival of generations of miners’ families. The colliers and their donkeys burrowed down ‘like ants into the earth, making queer mounds and little black places among the corn-fields and the meadows’ (p. 8) – a continuous history, in other words, of desecrated countryside and anonymous service to a vast capitalistic enterprise.