When Sons and Lovers was first seen by its reading public in 1913, its publishers had in fact, out of caution and timidity, shortened Lawrence's originally submitted version by about ten percent--cuts that are restored in this new ``uncensored and uncut'' edition. Complexity of characterization, intensity of characters' confrontations, and sexual frankness are now, say the publishers, as the author intended them. Example: ``He could smell her faint perfume'' returns to its original, ``He could smell her faint natural perfume, and it drove him wild with hunger.''

Having published the first six of a seven-volume edition of Lawrence's letters and the first of a three-volume biography, Cambridge University Press is also engaged in publishing new editions of his works, because previous editions "are, for the most part, textually corrupt." The purpose is "to provide texts which are as close as can now be determined to those he would have wished to see printed." He accepted, but did not approve of, the cutting of about 10% of Sons and Lovers by his editor, Edward Garnett, because Lawrence wanted the novel published. This new edition restores all of Garnett's cuts to Lawrence's final manuscript, "which is emended to incorporate Lawrence's proof revisions." Interestingly, the kinds and numbers of cuts, analyzed thoroughly in the 60-page introduction, which discusses every major stage of the novel, were made primarily to reduce the book to then saleable length rather than to censor explicit passages, though a few such passages were omitted or reworded. There are two appendixes (Lawrence's "Foreward" to the novel and information about the locales it mentions), 71 pages of notes, a 4-page dialect glossary, and 82 pages of textual variants in the different versions of the novel, starting with the final manuscript. Simultaneously published is a nonscholarly form of this new edition (priced at $24.95) that has a very brief foreward outlining three major kinds of cuts made by Garnett. J. E. Steiner; Drew University