A lovely book full of youthfulness and vivid, sensuous, brilliant descriptions of the English countryside. This is Lawrence's first novel, written when he was in his early twenties and, he claims, full of his own youth. It fills me with a desire to read of all of his work once again and perhaps thereby to come to a much fuller understanding of Lawrence than I have had before. Perhaps I can even contribute something to our common understanding of his work, his character, his thinking, and his dense symbolism. This is not a novel of plot but of characterization, with each chapter a self-contained short story but adding more information to what has gone before. Each chapters is like a little film taken at a specific time in the ten-year sweep of the novel. It's told in the first person by a very acute, quiet and modest narrator, whose name is Cyril but whose friends sometimes refer to as Sybil - and indeed there are numerous suggestions that the author was going through a period of same-sex attraction in the period before Frieda. The narrator goes everywhere and quietly witnesses everything about a small group of people growing up in the rural area of Nottingham, the Eastwood of Lawrence's birth. In form, this is very much like Women in Love and the other novels of that trilogy, but it gives one a stronger appreciation of Lawrence in some way. It is a coming of age novel, but one in which the narrator participates very modestly, merely as a spectator, and one who sprinkles a special atmosphere on everything that happens. The only fault in this novel is a slight but persistent sense of over-reaching on the part of the author. It leaves me feeling however that Lawrence, as great as he is deemed, is still underrated.