Gertrude Morel in Sons and Lovers
D. H. Lawrence wrote much of Sons and Lovers during his mother’s illness and the book is very much a reflection of her life as he saw it, and a response to his relationship with her. Lawrence adored his mother and felt that her life had been unhappy and indeed ‘wasted’ by her marriage to his unstable, difficult father. Gertrude Morel’s love for her sons, and indeed their love for her, is a painfully tender meditation on love between mother and son;
‘Something in the eternal repose of the uplifted cathedral, blue and noble against the sky, was reflected in her, something of the fatality. What was, was. With all his young will he could not alter it. He saw her face, the skin still fresh and pink and downy, but crow's-feet near her eyes, her eyelids steady, sinking a little, her mouth always closed with disillusion; and there was on her the same eternal look, as if she knew fate at last.’