D. H. Lawrence's Mother as Sleeping Beauty: The "Still Queen" of His Poems and Fictions
D. H. Lawrence's deep and painful love for his mother is one of the best known facts of literary biography. He was himself utterly candid about its nature and effects, writing to Rachel Annand Taylor as Mrs. Lawrence lay dying in 1910, "We have loved each other, almost with a husband and wife love, as well as filial and maternal. We knew each other by instinct. ... It has been rather terrible, and has made me, in some respects, abnormal" (Collected Letters I 69). Readers of Sons and Lovers and the powerful elegies and mother poems for Lydia Beardsall Lawrence may surmise how fervently her son hoped by writing them both to "shed