Sons and Lovers

The Nottinghamshire coalfield that made Lawrence. He renamed his home village of Eastwood "Bestwood" and the pit "Minton", but placed them exactly on the ground he grew up on: the collieries where his father worked, the Chambers family's Haggs Farm that became Miriam's, and Nottingham itself, where Paul takes the train to work and to the art school. It brings the English mining Midlands into the atlas.

Paul Morel

Bestwood (Eastwood)

Ch. 1 · 0% through the novel

And the cottages of these coal-miners, in blocks and pairs here and there, together with odd farms and homes of the stockingers, straying over the parish, formed the village of Bestwood.

The novel opens with the coalfield itself, the gin-pits swept aside by the great financiers' mines, and the miners' quarters thrown up on the hillside. Lawrence renamed his birthplace Bestwood, but every street and slope is Eastwood, the town he called "the country of my heart".

inspired by "Bestwood" is Lawrence's fictional name for Eastwood, the Nottinghamshire mining town where he was born in 1885. The village he describes, its Squares and Bottoms of miners' dwellings, is Eastwood on the ground; the pin marks the town centre.

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