Sons & Lovers - what would you compare it with?

[Mercedes]

Does anyone have any ideas about books to compare and contrast Sons & Lovers with at A Level?
Was asked for a friend's daughter but as I don't particulary like DH Lawrence I've avoided his books so have no idea and thought I would seek out the views of more widely read people.

anybody with any thoughts?

Something by Thomas Hardy?

OK, it was published in 1913. So Hardy's a bit previous (still alive but most of his oeuvre done with) - although you could usefully do Jude the Obscure, I'd have thought, published 1896 and interesting on sex and morality and being working-class. My brain is shamefully blank on the immediate contemporaries of the time.

You could be really masochistic and compare it to Henry James' The Golden Bowl (pub. 1904) if you really felt like working your way through two appalling novelists, of course.

Henry James - she's only 17 - it would be a shame to put her off reading for life. She told me the theme was about mothers and adolescent boys. I thought it was all about swimming naked in pools and having affairs but hey that was the film.
Are there any modern books to look foward rather than backwards?

There are different things you could pick up on for the comparison ...

• only very faintly disguised autobiography about youthfully deciding to be a writer/creator: Joyce - Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (also useful as being almost exactly contemporary)

• mothers and adolescent boys: Oedipus Rex, of course. Or any one of those contemporary "how I survived my parents" books, maybe Running With Scissors, which I haven't read but have heard good things of

• picture of that northern English late-19th/early-20th c. half-industrial half-rural existence: Arnold Bennett, Anna of the Five Towns (also a portrait of an adolescent working her way out of a parent's influence - this time a girl/father)

• fathers and adolescent boys: Gosse, Father and Son

If she's not yet a widely-read 17yo, I'd say Portrait of the Artist.

Sons, Mothers and Other Lovers is almost mandatory reading alongside Sons & Lovers - wish it had been written when I was studying this. It's good pop psychology though, not a work of literature.
Agree with bink - in an A Level context you need to show an awareness of Oedipus and Oedipal themes in literature, also agree totally that the beautiful, touching Father and Son is a book to enjoy in its own right (hugely preferred it to Sons & Lovers tbh)

This is me being poncey and not a suggestion, but just about the best picture of maternal power, and its effects on adolescent (or anyway, immature) maleness, which I have come across is Coriolanus.

How about Philip Roth's, Portnoy's Complaint? (if she doesn't object to the American Pies element of it).