Lady Chatterley's Lover

By D. H. Lawrence and David Ellis

Notes and Introduction by David Ellis, University of Kent at Canterbury.

With its four-letter words and its explicit descriptions of sexual intercourse, Lady Chatterley's Lover is the novel with which D.H. Lawrence is most often associated. First published privately in Florence in 1928, it only became a world-wide best-seller after Penguin Books had successfully resisted an attempt by the British Director of Public Prosecutions to prevent them offering an unexpurgated edition. The famous 'Lady Chatterley trial' heralded the sexual revolution of the coming decades and signalled the defeat of Establishment prudery.

Yet Lawrence himself was hardly a liberationist and the conservativism of many aspects of his novel would later lay it open to attacks from the political avant-garde and from feminists. The story of how the wife of Sir Clifford Chatterley responds when her husband returns from the war paralysed from the waist down, and of the tender love which then develops between her and her husband's gamekeeper, is a complex one open to a variety of conflicting interpretations.

This edition of the novel offers an occasion for a new generation of readers to discover what all the fuss was about; to appraise Lawrence's bitter indictment of modern industrial society, and to ask themselves what lessons there might be for the 21st century in his intense exploration of the complicated relations between love and sex.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions
• Release date: Jun 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781848704503

D. H. Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence, (185-1930) more commonly known as D.H Lawrence was a British writer and poet often surrounded by controversy. His works explored issues of sexuality, emotional health, masculinity, and reflected on the dehumanizing effects of industrialization. Lawrence’s opinions acquired him many enemies, censorship, and prosecution. Because of this, he lived the majority of his second half of life in a self-imposed exile. Despite the controversy and criticism, he posthumously was championed for his artistic integrity and moral severity.

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Lady Chatterley’s Lover

D. H. Lawrence

with an introduction and notes

by David Ellis

WORDSWORTH CLASSICS

This edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover first published by Wordsworth Editions Limited in 2005

Introduction and Notes © David Ellis 2005

Published as an ePublication 2014

ISBN 978 1 84870 450 3

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Contents

Introduction

Notes to the Introduction

Suggested Reading

Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Notes to Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Introduction

Lady Chatterley’s Lover made Lawrence a lot of money. It was first published in June 1928 and by the end of that year he was already a thousand pounds better off. This was a large sum for someone who had spent most of his previous life in modest circumstances and some of it (during the First World War) in extreme poverty. The money was useful because Lawrence was increasingly incapacitated by tuberculosis and therefore unable to rough it as he and his wife Frieda had so often done in the past. After a period in the seaside resort of Bandol in the South of France, he was moved to Vence, fifteen or so miles above Nice, and it was there that he died on 2 March 1930. Lawrence was fond of remembering that when at the end of 1910 his first novel (The White Peacock) had been published, a prominent London editor had written to his dying mother and predicted that her son would be riding in his own carriage by the time he was forty. [1] Had she lived long enough, Mrs Lawrence would not have been overjoyed to realise that although when the said son died at forty-four he had plenty of money in the bank, it was largely because of a book like Lady Chatterley’s Lover. ‘And you used to be such a dear good boy’ is what he recalled her saying to him as he grew older. [2]

The reason Lawrence did so well out of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is that he published it himself. In October 1926 he had finished a first version of the novel in which the sexual encounters between Connie Chatterley and the gamekeeper, who was then called Parkin, were not explicitly described. By that date Lawrence already had a reputation as someone who dealt with sexual matters in an uncomfortably direct fashion. His readers might well have remembered the meeting by the river of Paul Morel and Clara Dawes in Sons and Lovers, episodes between Ursula Brangwen and Rupert Birkin in The Rainbow, or the scene in Women in Love when Gerald Crich seeks consolation in the bed of Gudrun Brangwen. But in all these cases the most crucial moments of physical contact are left unstated, and there is heavy reliance on all that is implied in the use of such words as ‘afterwards’. Feeling perhaps that sexual intercourse was more central to his new novel than it had been to the others, Lawrence wrote a second version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover almost immediately after the first in which there was a minimum of elision and the descriptions were as explicit as he could make them. Real frankness, he must have decided, was impossible within the confines of ‘polite’ language and he therefore made use of cunt, fuck, shit, piss – words very rarely read in his time and usually only heard in hostile or aggressive contexts. One or two of these had made a fleeting appearance in the first version but they were now used without restraint.

The way in which the first version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was rewritten made it unpublishable by the usual channels but on 17 November 1927 Lawrence met in Florence a friend who published his own books and decided that he would to do the same. Rewriting the novel for a third and final time, he paid to have it printed in Florence and then sent out hundreds of leaflets offering it for sale in Britain and the United States. This was a risk but one which the net profit of a thousand pounds at the end of 1928 fully justified. The thousand or so copies he had printed quickly disappeared and the success of the novel led to a number of unauthorised, ‘pirate’ editions from the sale of which Lawrence himself received nothing. Enraged at the idea of people profiting from his labour in this way, he went to Paris in 1929 and arranged to have published there a cheap, second edition of his novel (the first had been sold at two and later four guineas). His chief intention was to make some money by underselling and therefore frustrating the pirates; but he was also anxious that ordinary people, of modest means, should read his work. It is altogether appropriate therefore that this present, Wordsworth edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover should be based on the text of the Paris edition.

It could well seem paradoxical that the novel which made Lawrence more money than he had ever had before was also the one in which modern society’s preoccupation with money-making is most fiercely denounced. For many details of its setting he was reliant on both his memory and what proved to be his last visit to his native country and region in the late summer of 1926. This was at the time of the continuing miners’ strike and observing its effects seems to have sharpened Lawrence’s dislike of how British society had developed since the war. His novel is full of images and episodes which convey his bitter regret at the way the semi-rural Nottinghamshire of his youth was being destroyed by fresh industrial enterprises and raw new housing estates. The effect of increasing industrialisation on the rural environment is most memorably suggested by the description in Chapter 13 of Sir Clifford Chatterley’s motorised bath chair crushing the flowers in the wood. Although Sir Clifford is presented as a relatively enlightened employer, Lawrence was inclined to blame the altered landscape of his native district on capitalist greed. But being critical of bosses did not mean that he was especially sympathetic to their workers since he clearly felt that, unlike his father, the miners of his own generation were only interested in wages. And yet Lawrence knew – and the diligence and efficiency with which he organised the distribution of Lady Chatterley’s Lover showed he knew – that if man does not live by bread alone there has nevertheless to be a few loaves in the house for him to live at all. It is not everyone who is like Connie Chatterley in having a private income to fall back on. Talking about money one day, Lawrence defended a friend from the suggestion that she should give up her modest fifty-pound annuity because it was unearned, yet he went on to say that, ‘Money, much money, has a really magical touch to make a man insensitive and so to make him wicked.’ [3] In November 1927, just before he began to rewrite Lady Chatterley’s Lover for the third time, he was visited by Michael Arlen, a friend from the war years whose recent best-seller, The Green Hat, had made him rich. Afterwards Lawrence reflected, ‘We talked my poverty – it has got on my nerves lately. But next day had a horrible reaction, & felt a sort of pariah. People must feel like that who make their lives out of money. Definitely I hate the whole money-making world, Tom and Dick as well as en gros.’ Yet then he added: ‘But I won’t be done by them either.’ [4] If these remarks do not resolve the paradox of making money out of a book in which money-making is denounced, they at least throw light on it.

The visit of Arlen, and the feelings it excited, had a determining effect on the way Lawrence wrote his third version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The attacks in the novel on greed, or what is called the Bitch Goddess of Success, are now extended to the literary field and Clifford becomes, in the first part, a writer whose essentially insignificant short stories bring him high financial returns. At the same time the wholly new character of Michaelis – clearly based on Arlen – is introduced. Arlen was a novelist rather than a playwright like Michaelis, but on his visit he had told Lawrence that the American stage adaptation of The Green Hat had brought him five thousand six hundred and fifty dollars in a single week. He is transposed into Lady Chatterley’s Lover with only minor changes. To justify his sense of exclusion from the high society he depicts in his work, and has earned enough money to frequent, Lawrence makes Michaelis Irish whereas Arlen was in fact Armenian and wrongly thought by many to be Jewish. During the war years, when he still went by his real name of Dikran Kouyoumdjian, Lady Ottoline Morrell had referred to him disparagingly as a ‘fat dark-blooded light-skinned Armenian Jew’, and as he became successful Rebecca West mocked his pretensions to gentility by saying that he was ‘every other inch a gentleman’. [5] Since the companies over which Lady Ottoline presided, and in which West moved, were not ones in which the working-class Lawrence ever felt entirely comfortable, there is a good deal of sympathy in the novel for Michaelis’s outsider status.

Basing a character in his fiction as directly as Michaelis is based on Arlen is not uncommon in Lawrence’s writing, but matters are usually more complicated. All novelists exploit their knowledge of others in the creation of their characters but the resulting figures are often amalgams and in any case narrative exigencies will frequently lead those figures to act and respond in ways quite alien to their supposed models. There is a good deal of Frieda in Connie Chatterley but also of other women Lawrence had known so that to think of Connie as a ‘portrait’ of his wife would be misleading. Less so is the common idea that Mellors is a portrait of the author, since he patently has many of Lawrence’s own characteristics. Born into the industrial proletariat, he has become educated and can operate successfully in middle- or upper-class society, without ever feeling at home there. Tall but thin, his health is fragile and he suffers from a bad cough. The descriptions in Chapter 14 of the first two unnamed women who disappointed him are unmistakably portraits of two women friends from Lawrence’s own early days, Jessie Chambers and Helen Cork. He is roughly the same age as his creator and holds identical opinions; yet in one crucial respect character and author are very different. In the 1950s Frieda wrote that, ‘The terrible thing about Lady C. is that L. identified himself with both Clifford and Mellors; that took courage, that made me shiver, when I read it as he wrote it.’ [6] What she was alluding to was that by 1927, whether or not Lawrence was technically impotent, he had certainly stopped having sexual relations with her. Lawrence may well have identified with Clifford in his impotence but his more obvious spokesman on this matter is Tommy Dukes who admits to being sexually inactive but continues to believe that the phallus is the only bridge to the future.

A friend of Arlen’s reported him as having been flattered and pleased by the depiction of him in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Although Michaelis is often the recipient of the author’s as well as Connie’s sympathy, this is surprising given the inglorious sexual role he is chosen to play. The affair Connie has with him after her husband has been shipped back from the war, paralysed from the waist down, is represented as unsatisfactory largely because he is such an inadequate lover, someone who was ‘always come and finished so quickly’. ‘Like so many modern men,’ Connie reflects, Michaelis ‘was finished almost before he had begun,’ and she refers at one point to his ‘pathetic, two-second spasms’. All this is in contrast to Mellors who not only does not come too quickly, but can also come and come again within a relatively short period. For Arlen not to have been hurt and offended by this aspect of his characterisation would have taken a good deal of tolerance, or a subtle understanding of how most novelists work.

Connie’s search for fulfilment outside marriage, with first Michaelis and then Mellors, inevitably raises the question of whether Lady Chatterley’s Lover is in fact the ‘good and proper’ book Lawrence often insisted it was. [7] Conventional opinion of his time would have been offended by the novel because it dealt with adultery. So of course did many famous novels of the nineteenth century but in those the adulterous relationship was not across a class divide and in any case the results were eventually unhappy. At the end of Anna Kerenina the heroine commits suicide. Eighty years on, an objection of this kind hardly cuts much ice. Some modern readers may still be made uncomfortable by the moment in Chapter 13 when Connie kisses Mellors’ hand as it lies on the back of the wheelchair just behind Clifford’s head, but that partners in marriage are not always faithful to each other is hardly a shock now. Nor in fact could it have been so much of a shock in 1928 when the marriage tie was no longer regarded as it had been in the nineteenth century and there was a growing recognition that the inadequacy of one or other of the marriage partners might well make its continuance unreasonable. The more acute problem for the less hide-bound at that date was rather how and why Clifford had become inadequate. The chief reason offered is obviously his injury during the war and, only nine years after the conflict had ended, when people were still surrounded by visible indications of the human damage it had caused, this was a sensitive subject.

Lawrence later expressed some unease about his portrayal of Clifford. He had often been asked, he wrote, whether Clifford’s injuries were meant to be symbolic. It had not been his conscious intention to make them so, he explained, but after he had read over the novel’s first version,

I recognised that the lameness of Clifford was symbolic of the paralysis, the deeper emotional or passional paralysis, of most men of his sort and class, today. I realised that it was perhaps taking an unfair advantage of Connie, to paralyse him technically. It made it so much more vulgar of her to leave him. Yet the story came as it did, by itself, so I left it alone. Whether we call it symbolism or not, it is, in the sense of its happening, inevitable. [8]

On one level Clifford may be a symbolic or, perhaps more accurately, a representative figure, but on another he is presented with so much particularity, and in such realistic detail, that it is difficult to avoid thinking of him as a poignant individual case, and one with which many readers of the time would have been familiar from their daily experience. To mitigate the impact of the character in this guise, and thereby protect Connie from the ‘vulgarity’ he mentions, Lawrence suggests that Clifford had been an indifferent lover before his injuries, and that he had never been very interested in sex. Apart therefore from the question of an heir to his estate and name, having to forgo a sexual life is not, it is suggested, the disaster it might have been for another kind of man.

Something of a disaster it nevertheless remains and in Lawrence’s treatment of it there are traces of that stern Nietzschean morality which he had already displayed in such earlier writings as ‘The Daughters of the Vicar’ or ‘The Fox’. This insists that no injuries on the scale Clifford suffers them are without corresponding psychological impairment and that therefore their victims necessarily become a threat to the healthy and undamaged. In Nietzsche’s view, the weak are inclined to prey on the strong by exploiting the latter’s feelings of sympathy and guilt, or their sense of duty. But this is immoral because, as he writes in The Genealogy of Morals, ‘Our first rule on this earth should be that the sick must not contaminate the healthy . . . The right to exist of the full-toned bell is a thousand times greater than that of the cracked, miscast one: it alone heralds the future of mankind.’ [9] Connie is tied to Clifford by pity but the consequence is that, denied both sexual and emotional fulfilment, she becomes ill. The novel insists on her moral right to that fulfilment rather than on her Christian duty to her crippled husband, although in doing so it softens the sharp, Nietzschean edges of the dilemma by showing that the special needs of that husband are in any case more than adequately met by Mrs Bolton, the nurse who willingly takes over from Connie her responsibilities of care. That it does this may indicate in Lawrence some recognition that Clifford cannot help being as he is any more than Michaelis can help being an inadequate lover. In one scheme of things, which combines easily enough with the Nietzschean, both these figures are predestined to failure while Mellors is a member of the elect. Calvinist as he sometimes is, this is partly Lawrence’s feeling, yet in showing that both Clifford and Michaelis often make a bad situation worse, there is also a belief in individual moral responsibility which it is hard to imagine any great novelist being without.

There is more to Lady Chatterley’s Lover than explicit accounts of sexual intercourse. The novel contains numerous fine descriptions of the natural and industrial landscape around Nottingham and there are many dramatic and sharply rendered human exchanges. Apart from the three principals and Michaelis, it could be thought short on characters since the ‘cronies’ who discuss sex and other matters of general interest with the Chatterleys are pasteboard figures belonging more to the novel of ideas than to the realist tradition within which Lady Chatterley’s Lover is principally conceived. Yet Mrs Bolton is a fully rounded figure who might easily have found a place in a novel by George Eliot or Thomas Hardy. In the words he gives to Mrs Bolton (her ‘gossip’), Lawrence exhibits his remarkable ear for English colloquial speech with a regional inflection, and as Connie listens to them there occurs one of those memorable formulations which constitute another positive feature of the novel. ‘Connie was fascinated, listening to her,’ Lawrence writes,

but afterwards always a little ashamed. She ought not to listen with this queer rabid curiosity. After all, one may hear the most private affairs of other people, but only in a spirit of respect for the struggling, battered thing which any human soul is . . .

For all its incidental strengths or attributes, Lady Chatterley’s Lover is none the less a novel which is dominated by the sexual relations between Connie and Mellors. When the Director of Public Prosecutions attempted in 1960 to prevent Penguin Books from publishing an unexpurgated version, the chief prosecuting counsel may have been wrong to claim that it contained nothing except sex, but sexual relations are quite clearly and designedly its main topic. Just as clear is that Lawrence’s intention in describing those relations in such detail was not to titillate, however often since that may have been the effect. No one more sternly disapproved of pornography than Lawrence. A writer in the nineteenth-century mould, he regarded himself as quite as much a teacher as an entertainer. Interviewed in 1925 by an American journalist, he was asked what it was that made him write. Egotism and the desire to let everyone know how clever he is, was the answer Frieda quickly gave on his behalf. But Lawrence himself protested that he wrote ‘from a deep moral sense – for the race, as it were’, and he added that,

A writer writes because he can’t help writing, and because he has something in him that he feels he can say better than it has been said before, and because it would be wrong, entirely wrong, to possess a talent and have thoughts without sharing them with the world. [10]

In his later novels especially, Lawrence used his fiction to share his thoughts with the world and to suggest remedies for the grave disorders with which he felt it was afflicted. The fervour with which he accepted the responsibilities of the novelist as teacher increased as he grew older and serves both to acquit him of merely wanting to excite his readers in Lady Chatterley’s Lover and explain why so many of those readers have found the earlier novels less satisfactory than the later.

In Sons and Lovers there is a certain glamour about the mine where the hero’s father works and it was only in his later years that Lawrence blamed industry for the destruction of traditional ways of life and associated it with the obsession with money which he felt had corrupted every level of English society. This is the state of affairs he sets out to expose and denounce in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, while at the same time showing that the only salvation lay in warm and tender human relationships, particularly those between men and women. But a warm relationship between a man and a woman, the novel insists, must be based on sex and not sex which is casual or frivolous but deeply serious. Because of modern society’s ruthless exploitation of natural resources, most people have become fatally disconnected from their human and natural environment; but a satisfactory sexual relationship, in which the sex constituted a genuine sharing and was non-masturbatory, could be either a sign that, in the individuals concerned, the connection still existed, or a move towards its restoration. The importance of sex was that it made one part of a living, organic, natural world. In Lawrence’s view, this truth could not be conveyed without the utmost frankness in his characters’ discussions of sex and his own description of sexual encounters, a frankness only possible through avoidance of the usual polite euphemisms or medical terms and the rescue of words like ‘cunt’ and ‘fuck’ from the unpleasant contexts in which they generally appear. As he later explained in an essay he wrote on ‘Pornography and Obscenity’, it was also necessary to recognise that one reason why in the past sex had so often been regarded as a ‘dirty little secret’ was that the organs concerned had an excretory as well as a sexual function. Although in ‘the really healthy human being the distinction between the two is instant’, he felt that it was confusion on this issue which led many people to ‘do dirt’ on sex. [11] The solution was open recognition and clarity of the kind which Mellors exhibits when, as his fingertips touch ‘the two secret openings of [Connie’s] body, time after time, with a soft little brush of fire’, he tells her: ‘An’ if tha shits and pisses, I’m glad. I don’t want a woman as couldna shit nor piss.’ A little later he links this statement with the general theme of the novel when he adds, ‘An’ if I only lived ten minutes, an’ stroked thy arse an’ got to know it, I should reckon I’d lived one life, see ter! Industrial system or not!’

It was in terms much like these I am using here that over thirty defence witnesses characterised Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the 1960 trial and helped to secure a triumphant acquittal. Because very few of those who disliked the novel wanted to see it censored, it was only later that hard questions were raised about how the case had been presented, or some began to suggest that there were discrepancies between the experience of reading the book and the way Lawrence defended it in subsequent writings such as ‘Pornography and Obscenity’ but more particularly of course his ‘A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover ’ (‘Never trust the teller trust the tale’ was one of his own rules for literary discussion). In a final address to the jury, the chief prosecuting counsel, who either had not wished or had not been able to call a single witness in support of his case, read out the passage from Chapter 16 which begins, ‘It was a night of sensual passion . . . ’ (p. 218), hinting at what might be found objectionable in it but not explaining clearly what that was. It was only later that John Sparrow convincingly argued that the passage contained references to anal intercourse. He went on to observe that, although the defence witnesses had praised Lawrence’s courageous frankness in talking about sex, these references were unusually obscure and only properly intelligible when read in conjunction with the discussions of Mellors’ sexual preferences which occur in the letters sent to Connie while she is abroad. [12] What he might also have noted is that, while there had been much talk at the trial of the tenderness of the relation between Connie and Mellors, this final encounter before she leaves England involves ‘piercing thrills of sensuality, different, sharper, more terrible than the thrills of tenderness’. Connie is at first an ‘almost unwilling’ partner, a ‘little frightened’, but the episode is presented as a burning out of shame, ‘the deepest, oldest shames, in the most secret places’: a question of penetrating to the ‘last and deepest recess of organic shame’ which, Lawrence insists, ‘the phallus alone could explore’. Shame has to be defeated, the implication is, in order to avoid those fatal confusions which Lawrence describes in ‘Pornography and Obscenity’, but the process is not in its nature a loving one and it costs Connie an effort ‘to let [Mellors] have his way and his will of her. She had to be a passive, consenting thing, like a slave, a physical slave’. Although this episode is not characteristic of the relationship between Connie and Mellors in general, it is surprising that it received so little attention from the prosecution in the 1960 trial and it was certainly in the interests of the defence counsel to ignore it.

In ‘A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, Lawrence writes warmly and appreciatively of marriage, citing it as the greatest contribution the Catholic Church ever made to Western culture. The kind of marriage he celebrates is indissoluble and yet Connie certainly dissolves hers. What might seem to save Lawrence from contradiction here is the insistence in ‘A Propos’ that ‘marriage is no marriage which is not basically and permanently phallic’ – a proviso which, as he puts it, ‘crashes through our heart like a bullet’. [13] ‘Phallic’ could here be interpreted as meaning ‘fully sexual’, or even no more than warm and tender. Certainly when Lawrence talks of ‘phallic consciousness’ in his later writings he often means bodily awareness, or a way of living in close and intimate contact with both the human and the non-human environment. In this context sex becomes, as Mellors puts it on the last occasion he sees Connie, ‘really only touch’. It is, however, he goes on to say, ‘the closest of all touch’ and it is hard not to think of his own warmth and connectedness as somehow dependent on a satisfactory sexual life, or at least on the memory of one. This would suggest that both the phallic consciousness he himself exhibits, and the phallic marriage to which Lawrence refers, cannot be easily separated from the phallus itself, the male organ; and it is with that organ – feminist writers increasingly complained after the 1960 trial – that there is in the novel an unhealthy preoccupation and one which indicated a masculine view of sexual experience both ignorant and unjust. Kate Millet, for example, in a highly influential book, first published in 1970, made Lawrence the centrepiece of her attack on male attitudes to women and began her section on his work by quoting the passage in which Connie observes with admiration and awe Mellors’ erect penis. Since the light in this episode is provided by the sun shining through a low window, she is able to characterise it as ‘a transfiguration scene with atmospheric clouds and lighting, and a pentacostal sunbeam . . . illuminating the ascension of the deity thick and arching before the reverent eyes of the faithful’. [14] This attitude to the phallus is for her symptomatic of the way in which specifically female sexual experience is ‘devalued in the novel. All Connie’s meetings with Mellors may be seen from her point of view but the perspective is one which, for Millet, is too obviously inflected by the needs and priorities of the male author – in the episode involving anal intercourse, it seemed highly significant to her that the initially reluctant Connie is described as discovering that she had ‘secretly wanted’ this ‘phallic hunting out’ after all.

In Connie’s encounters with Michaelis, she waits until he has ejaculated and then reaches her own climax while his erect penis is still inside her – bringing herself off, or ‘grinding her own coffee’ as Mellors terms it when denouncing the same practice in the wife from whom he is separated, Bertha Coutts. The first time Connie makes love with Mellors, the first half of this pattern repeats itself but Connie is disinclined to complete it, and in later meetings that need is in any case obviated by the satisfaction brought her by her new lover’s powers of rapid recovery. The success of their physical relationship is attributed by Lawrence to the potency of Mellors but also, and perhaps even more importantly, to the way Connie allows him to take the initiative, becomes if not submissive then at least compliant. For Millet, the sexual relationship is a microcosm in which one can see reflected the power relations of society at large and Connie’s submission to Mellors can therefore be regarded as yet one more illustration of the tyranny which for centuries men have exercised over women. But in Lawrence’s traditionalist view there were innate differences between men and women which made the search for equality in the more private spheres of living a foolish enterprise, and he clearly believed that the feminists of his own day were on the wrong track. What he felt about them can partly be gauged by Mellors’ harsh treatment of Connie’s sister Hilda, and by the way the other ‘independent’ women who visit Wragby are presented.

Many of Millet’s objections to Lady Chatterley’s Lover were rearticulated twenty years after the publication of her Sexual Politics by Germaine Greer, who accused Lawrence of having enunciated ‘all the great lies of phoney liberation’. [15] Of the features of the book she stigmatises which might fall into that category, the most important is perhaps vaginal orgasm, somehow separated by Lawrence from the clitoris. But Greer also refers to the damage she feels was done by his over-concern with lovers reaching their climax simultaneously, and she objects as Millet had done, and as indeed anyone might, to the virulence with which Mellors denounces women who bring themselves off, and more particularly to his suggestion that they are nearly all lesbians. Her complaints are especially important in that she admits to having championed the novel in the sexual radicalism of her youth, only later discovering that its author had clay feet. She implicitly presents herself (that is) as a witness of the process whereby, from being a hero in the years leading up to the 1960 trial, Lawrence became a villain after it. In part because of the intensity of his relationship with his mother, Lawrence had developed a special insight into the feelings of women to which, during his lifetime, his many female admirers often testified; and he was unusual among male authors of his period in so often adopting female protagonists, the most notable of these being Ursula Brangwen in both The Rainbow and Women in Love. The risk he took in Lady Chatterley’s Lover was to try to represent female experience at its most gender specific. For Mark Spilka, writing in 1980, ‘the imaginative rendering of a woman’s sexual experience’ in Lady Chatterley’s Lover was the novel’s ‘unassailable triumph’. [16] By that date many female critics were already taking a different view and their implied charge was that, just as the potency of Mellors was, for the Lawrence writing in 1928, an expression of wish-fulfilment, so the physical and psychological compliance of Connie was no more than an idealised, male view of what women ought to be, and how they ought to feel.

In the years after Lawrence’s death in 1930, the growing reputation of his last novel was partly dependent on its being read according to the implied prescriptions in ‘Pornography and Obscenity’ or ‘A Propos’, and Mellors’ address to Connie, ‘Th’art good cunt, though, aren’t ter? Best bit o’ cunt left on earth,’ could therefore serve as an illustration of the need for openness in any consideration of sexual matters. With the seismic shift of opinion which the new wave of feminism brought in the 1970s, these words inevitably began to sound as if Connie’s cunt was for Mellors the only feature which defined her. Important changes of public feeling not only mean that identical aspects of a novel are differently interpreted but also that some which were previously neglected become salient while others sink into the background. Lawrence’s complaints in Lady Chatterley’s Lover about the way the search for profit has despoiled the countryside and brutalised the working classes may not have the force they once had because, comparing our time with his, we can reflect that he didn’t know the half of it; but his description of Connie’s drive through Tevershall in Chapter 11 still resonates powerfully. Critics of the novel will naturally concentrate on the bitterness of Mellors’ denunciation of women, which seem less the dramatically appropriate consequence of his antecedents and more a result of his being used as a mouthpiece by the author; and their attention will be drawn to the ‘night of sensual passion’. Yet in the main the book does tell a tender love story (as the witnesses at the 1960 trial said it did), and one in which there is not only an insistence on a woman’s right to sexual satisfaction but also, unusually for Lawrence, to the satisfaction of her maternal instincts also. Connie desperately wants a baby but not on the terms Sir Clifford unimaginatively proposes. Although Germaine Greer characterises the disillusioned Mellors as ‘a pretty boorish lay’, the reader is made to feel that he will prove a reliable husband and father and that Connie will therefore be happy to go off with him to a remote farm, a contented wife and mother. This is not every woman’s idea of fulfilment, and it is no doubt a weakness of the novel that Lawrence, whose temperament was naturally authoritarian, tends to imply it should be – that he ignores the huge variety of ways in which different people satisfy their sexual needs and manage to lead rich lives. Yet the case for Connie’s solutions is powerfully and often movingly put. In ‘A Propos’ Lawrence talks of the need for marriage to be ‘basically and permanently phallic’ (my italics), but this is unlikely to mean that what will enrichen Connie’s future life are sexual experiences of the same frequency and intensity as those described so graphically in the novel. What the final letter of Mellors suggests is rather that even the memory of such experiences would be enough to constitute a successful marriage, as it is shown to be for Mrs Bolton.

Lawrence accurately noted that Lady Chatterley’s Lover had two chief enemies between which there was hardly any space to turn: puritanism and the advanced views of the young. [17] The first of these opponents was slow to rouse itself. By the time the British authorities finally confiscated copies of the novel coming into the country, the overwhelming majority had already been sold; but the Establishment had its revenge when the police raided an exhibition of Lawrence’s paintings, which had opened in London in 1929, and seized all those in which there was any sign of pubic hair. He found this kind of response deeply irritating but must have known that those responsible for it were a dying breed, brought up in the repressive, late-Victorian moral atmosphere of his own youth. Far more formidable were the younger people who had learnt to dissipate the anxiety surrounding sex by making it more casual, depriving it of both centrality and what they considered its mystique, and reducing sexual intercourse to just one of the many things men and women could do together. The danger these attitudes represented to Lawrence’s own point of view is evident from the fact that it is not so much puritanism which is stigmatised in his novel but the ‘advanced’ views of Clifford and his friends. Lawrence was after all a puritan himself although one who had struggled hard to rid himself of prudery. If he wanted to be frank about sex it was because nothing seemed to him more important, both for the individual and the community at

Reviews for Lady Chatterley's Lover

[kemilyh1988 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Misogyny abound. Regardless, it's quite hilarious. The first time I read this all I remembered was sex and chickens. This time around I picked up on much more. The narration by John Lee was perfect.

[theampersand · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I've loved modernist fiction for a long time, but I've had a love-hate relationship with D.H. Lawrence for about as long. Lady Chatterley's lover is the best Lawrence I've ever read. Yes, you can still find what I think of as his bad habits there: his tendency to describe everything using opposites, his obsession with vitality which often seems, as someone else put it, "a sick man's dream of health," his obvious disdain for many of his characters and their choices. But all of these tendencies are reined in here: even his tendency toward repetition comes off as lyrical rather than merely trying. I can enthusiastically recommend it to people who don't much like D.H. Lawrence. What's most delightful about "Lady Chatterley" is that, considering a book that's supposedly about an intense, erotic affair between two people, it's surprisingly wide-ranging. One of the things that makes this book work is, oddly enough, is how carefully Lawrence crafts its temporal and physical setting. Beyond Constance and Oliver's relationship, we get a clear-eyed description of the generalized despair that followed the end of the First World War, a pitiless description of the British artistic scene, a careful transcription of the Derby dialect, and a look destructive effects of the coal industry on Lawrence's beloved British countryside that's simultaneously regretful and buzzing with dark energy. His descriptions of both the main characters' erotic adventures and the lush woods that they have them in are truly beautiful, there are passages where everything in the book seems to pulse with sensuality and life. For all his opinions about the state in which he found the world, I can't think of too many writers who were more interested in writing the body than Lawrence was. This novel might owe its notoriety to its four-letter words and its explicitness, but it also communicates the physicality of both sex and mere being exceptionally well. The paralyzed Clifford is sort of given short shrift here -- one imagines that he's got a body, too, though Lawrence depicts him as largely inert. Also, even while he praises the joy of sexual congress, Lawrence seems to have a lot of ideas about exactly how men and women should and shouldn't have sex. In the final analysis, though, seeing as it was produced by a writer who sometimes comes off as bitter and spiteful about the modern world, "Lady Chatterley" seems like a surprisingly optimistic argument for romantic and physical love. This may be especially true of its lovely final pages, where Constance and Oliver plan out a future that emphasizes the rhythms of nature, their love, and their truest selves. A difficult book from a difficult writer, but certainly worth the effort.

[trinity_3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

There are a few things you need to get past in order to truly enjoy this book. It was banned and controversial, the book also focuses explicitly at times on the sexual relationships of the characters. You have to look beyond those things to truly understand what this book is about. Its about relationships but it more focuses on women's struggle with their own sexuality and being a good wife. As women we are taught to be dutiful wives, to worry more about our husbands and families than ourselves. Our sexuality is dirty or shameful. The book explores Constance's struggle against what she should do and her need to follow what she wants to do. I loved this book and could really identify with Constance's dilemmas throughout this book. I gave it 5 stars.

[terrapinjetta_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Up until I read this, I hadn't imagined that any 'older' books could tackle the sort of topics that Lawrence tackles in Lady Chatterly's Lover. His insights made me look out especially for his other books.

[dictator555 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I read this book when I was still a kid. It was raining out, and I was bored. I didn't think I'd like it, since classics can be boring. To my surprise, I enjoyed it, and I still think back on it to this day. DH Lawrence is, of course, a really amazing writer and there were some passages that have stayed with me all this time. The bit about there being plenty of fish in the sea, but if you aren't the right sort of fish (herring, mackeral?) then really there weren't that many fish in the sea. He said it better of course!I also really appreciated the depiction of intimacy. Sex as something imperfect and flawed yet still moving and meaningful. The focus on intimacy through imperfection was so new to me. I understand it more now than I did then, and I'm kind of amazed at how well Lawrence wrote the female character's experience so well.I'm really glad I read this book. I wonder if it isn't about time for a re-read!

[libraryofus · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

(Alistair) Unfortunately for such a well-known and historically important book, _Lady Chatterley's Lover_ posesses the dubious distinction of simply not being very good.Or, to make no bones about it, of being just plain bad.

[poetontheone · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is not the sort of pornographic screed that so many imagine it to be, though I had not expected it to be from having read other works of a similar reputation and finding them to have an altogether different purpose than titillation. Lawrence's goal here is to sound the battle cry of the body against the cold machinery of industry and privileged intellectualism. He makes this evident multiple times in both narration and dialogue. He eventually makes this Connie's cause celebre, but it is not always believable given her upper crust naivete, which moves in and out of her personality like the flicker of a faulty candle. That is to say nothing about Mellors' apparent indifference to Connie throughout much of the work. Despite some thin characterization, Lawrence crafts a lyrical and readable prose and paints a celebration of the body and its passions. All the while, the reality of an increasingly soulless and mechanized world lurks in the background as a phantasmal antagonist.

[laugal-2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very good read and highly recommended.

[bookworm12_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Lady Constance Chatterley marries her husband shortly before World War I. He returns from the war paralyzed from the waist down. Their relationship continues to stagnant in the countryside until she has an affair with their gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. The book was considered incredibly racy it was published in 1928. The full novel wasn’t even published in England until 1960. I decided to read this because it’s one of the most banned books of all time. To me, the novel was a gross simplification of love. Physical love is part of relationships, but it’s not the only element. Lawrence seemed to think that without the physical connection there was no way that Constance and her husband Clifford could ever love each other. Her superficial connection with Oliver never rang true to me. Oliver Mellors’ character was hard to stomach. He’s racist, homophobic, selfish, and quick to lose his temper. The only thing Constance actually has in common with him is their mutual physical attraction. It’s hard to believe Lawrence’s premise that this is the most powerful relationship she can have. It would be more believable if Constance had an affair with him, began to understand the importance of the physical side of relationships and then found someone that satisfied both the physical and mental desires that she had. BOTTOM LINE: It’s a classic and I’m glad I read it, but it’s definitely not a new favorite. Lawrence writes some beautiful passages, but the characters and the plot fell short.

[madepercy-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I am pleased to have read The First Lady Chatterley before reading this third draft of the same novel. The first draft, despite a similar plot, had a completely different feel to it. The emergence of socialism has little importance in Lady Chatterley's Lover, almost as if Lawrence tried to wrench away from political commentary and social change so he could nestle the third draft safely back into its own class. Despite the obviously more vulgar language used in this draft, and the notorious details that led to it being banned for decades, I think this more famous draft suffers if it is not read in the context of the first. Rather than predict the rise of nationalisation and social democracy in Britain, Lawrence's character Mellor (formerly Parkin), instead appears to presage the Great Depression. I can only guess as to the differences in the second draft, but I am curious enough to track it down and find out. As for this novel's notoriety, readers today will be well desensitised to the parts that caused a scandal in the past. I can only imagine Lawrence's shock if he were to experience what is now so passé in our own time. With three D.H. Lawrence novels now under my belt, I will venture to read the rest.

[fliss88_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

At the start I thought, I'm not going to finish this, as I found the story quite slow moving. I'm glad I persevered, and although by today's standards it wouldn't be on a Banned Books List, I can see why it was at the time of publication. This is my first experience of D.H. Lawrence and his writing style slowly grew on me, so much so that by the end I had settled into and enjoyed the slow pace, the characters and the look back at his time and place. It's very well written and I could easily sympathise with all the characters, and appreciate the way they each found themselves trapped.

[justagirlwithabook · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

 This one was alright. I don't think there's a ton that's memorable aside from it being considered 'racy,' but it's DH Lawrence, so. It's not one that I'll likely reread again.

[over.the.edge · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Lady Chatterley's Lover🍒🍒🍒
By DH Lawrence
1928

Constance Chatterley is trapped in an unfulfilling marriage to a rich aristocrat whose war wounds have left him paralyzed and impotent. After a brief sexual affair, she becomes involved with the gamekeeper on the family estate. Oliver Mellors, the composite opposite of her husband, is unfulfilled as well by his wife Bertha, whose method of punishment is to withhold any intimacy. Their relationship develops as Constance begins to use Olivers shed as a sort of retreat. The curiosity and eventual lust grow and develop and soon they are intimately involved. First as a need, then a desire. This is the story of their intimate and beautiful relationship, and an example of this books premise: individual rejuvenation through love and personal relationships.
This book brought to mind, for me anyway, how we define love. What it is...what is means....how it's shared. What is the meaning of adultery...is it more than sex?
Masterful....intense.....a classic.....

[waitingtoderail · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A more literate than average romance novel. One of the first of its kind, so important, but for this reader at least, banal and uninspiring.

[dbsovereign · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Pretty tame by today's standards, but Lawrence's is still the language of life and was the language of a revolution in its day. Probably the most banned book ever.

[dele2451 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A young woman is torn between the man she married who is disabled by war early after their union and the virile gamekeeper who relieves her from her desperate loneliness. A familar theme, but this version is told impeccably well. Definitely worth the read, but I can't help wondering what happened to the baby.

[esquetee_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Started reading this as an e-book from Project Gutenberg but I wanted to make too many notes so I switch to a paper edition and discovered that the e-book was the censored / edited version. Grrrr!*** Kinda / Sorta Spoilers ***There are really two different books to review in the Penguin hardcover -- Lady Chatterley's Lover and then Lawrence's bizarre letter afterward. The novel itself is frustrating, beautiful, a little dry, and passionate. I can see why it was called Lady Chatterley's *Lover* and not "Lady Chatterley". The gamekeeper was a fantastic character - I loved his little speeches, his mixed up dialects, and his stubbornness. Lady Chatterley herself I found pretty boring pretty early. But the gamekeeper kept me reading. And then... you finish the book, and find this defense by D.H. Lawrence written several years after the first edition was published. In some parts, it's brilliant and in other parts, he seems completely, without-a-doubt insane. And then I find myself agreeing with some of the things he wrote and start wondering, "Am I insane, too?"

[fothpaul · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Took me a while to get through this one, some chapters faster than others. I wanted to know what happened in the end but wasn't that invested in the characters. Lots of postulating about mean being real men and the working and middle classes after the end of WW1. Pleased I read it so I could see what all the scandal was about. Mainly interesting as a piece of cultural history.

[luli81_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Another treat. Thanks Mr. Lawrence... Apart from the abstract world of ideas, Lawrence showed his readers that he can also be strongly physical and down to the fleshy earth. A very erotic novel.

[marysgirl · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I can see why this was so controversial in the past, but the language and images are definitely mild by today's standards. A lyrical story of sexual awakening. I would recommend reading this back-to-back with [Their Eyes Were Watching God] by [[Zora Neale Hurston]], another excellent story of sexual awakening.

[evanaizabely_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Translation by Martin Claret. There are some translation errors that should be revised asap.

[ericquill · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wow...D.H. Lawrence's descriptive talent is alive in this novel. The sexual content, that was so controversial shortly after it's publication, is woven within the story with good taste and is, by no means, smutty or offensive. Like John Travolta said in "Phenomenon"...it is a guide to a woman's heart and emotions.

[fig2_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A shocking affair between a frustrated wife and the gamekeeper on her estate is explicitly explored in this beautiful novel. Originally banned as pornography, this novel lives up to the hype surrounding it. You must read it!

[epictale · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed the story for its depiction of Connie's journey and, to a lesser extent, Mellors's as well. I also thought Lawrence's depiction of Sir Clifford "Life of the Mind" Chatterley was masterful. The author allowed Sir Clifford to reveal his blind spots and psychoses without being preachy or patronizing. I might have titled the book "Lady Chatterley's Cuckold".

[cathymoore_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I can't say I was particularly enamoured with this, although I am glad I have read it. Perhaps it just wasn't what I expected it to be. I found the political/class war aspect rather dull and all of the characters pretty unsympathetic. Both Clifford and Connie both seemed rather caught up in their own misery and self-loathing and I often wondered whether Mellors actually even liked Connie let alone loved her. To be honest I felt like giving them all a good kick up the backside. I thought the sex scenes, for which the book was banned for so many years, were neither tame nor overly offensive , just provocative, as if Lawerence had incuded them deliberately for the shock value at the time.

[joririchardson · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"Lady Chatterly's Lover" caught my attention as soon as I began reading it. The characters were very realistic, and I liked the elegant, drama-filled writing.The storyline is about an affair. Connie Chatterly is married to a man who has been paralyzed from the waist down. Not only is her husband incapable of performing sexually, but the main character does not love him. So when Connie meets Mellors, a mysterious gamekeeper who works on her husband's estate, she is drawn to him both romantically and sexually. They begin a heated affair, prompting Connie to think about her life, and what she wants from it. For Lawrence's time, this book was shocking. Even today, it is obvious that the author's intention was to surprise the less open minded. This book contains a lot of sex - and I loved the old fashioned descriptions and words used. They simply felt out of place with the X-rated scenes, a combination that I liked.I loved the characters in this book, especially the three main persons of Connie, her husband, and Mellors. They were remarkably realistic. The only thing that I didn't like about this book was that it was so long winded. Much of the book was, though not painful, certainly tedious reading. But, overall, I enjoyed reading my first D.H. Lawrence.

[philsyphe · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I added this over a year ago but for some reason it's recently disappeared from my "read" list!Anyway, I read this twice because one of my modules at university was about D. H. Lawrence. First read was for class, second read was for essay preparation.Found out during the module that I'm not a Lawrence fan, though of all the works of his I read, "Lady Chatterley's Lover" was the best of the bunch.

[crashmyparty · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I knew, before reading this book, that Lady Chatterley's Lover had a scandalous history, so I figured it must get pretty hot and heavy. But I didn't expect the eloquent, elegant authorship of this book, even including those scandalous sex scenes that caused so much trouble for Lawrence. I was a little bit in awe of Lawrence's writing, but not as much by the story as I wanted to be. Because yes, there is a story around the sex. Lady Chatterley's husband Sir Clifford is a war cripple and the couple have no children. The utter boringness and 'self-importance' of Sir Clifford drives Connie into the arms of other men, which he doesn't really seem to mind as long as its tasteful and he gets an heir which he will then raise as his own. BUT this does not apply to the gamekeeper Oliver Mellors, who Connie inexplicably falls in love with after a couple of stilted conversations and a few sexual encounters she doesn't really get much out of (at least to start with). I didn't really see the attraction, but, y'know, each to their own.It seemed like there should have been more to this story and especially to the end, but after the building to the climax (pun not intended) it just sort of petered away into a half-hearted ending. By that point, I was expecting more from it. Still wasn't too bad of a read to see what caused all the fuss. 

[kell1732 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Now this was a slog of a book. I managed to finish it, but looking back, I should have just stopped when I realized that this book was so not worth my time. I had heard from various people whose opinions I respect and often agree with that this book needed to be on my reading list. Well, I got that out of the way.I thought the characters were dull, and I couldn't have cared less how this whole affair ended. Many a time I found myself thinking that this whole thing was just stupid. I got annoyed with Clifford and his whole, "You can go have a baby with some other guy, but I have to approve of the guy" schtick. Really? Constance, run away!While I am normally pretty good with understanding that these books are from a different time period, and that things were vastly different back then, I just could not sympathize with anyone in this book. I just wanted Constance to cut to the chase and run off with the hugely boring and uninteresting Mellors and let me get back to reading something worth my time. Maybe it's because I just don't see this situation being as scandalous today as it was then, and I know that this goes back to reading it with the knowledge of the time period, but I do expect there to be some relevancy to today that will keep me engaged in the book. I didn't see that here. Even in Tess of the d' Ubervilles there relevancy to today's society and the issue women still have fighting against a patriarchal system. While I can see Constance's situation as still being stigmatized today, (cause when isn't a woman making choices about sex not stigmatized) I couldn't help but be annoyed with her after a while for not just standing up for herself and leaving. It took forever!Maybe I would have felt more sympathetic if I had actually like Mellors, but since I really didn't care about him, and didn't understand what Constance saw in the man, I just wanted her to get on with it. I actually found him rather disrespectful and unlikable. I personally would have nothing to do with someone like Mellors, so I couldn't understand why Constance did.It was this and all the pretentious, philosophical discussions between very boring men about the meaning of sex and why they don't get what all the fuss is about. Is it just me or does this just seem a little unnatural? I also couldn't help but notice the absence of Constance's opinion on the matter (cause who wants to hear a woman talk about sex) even though she is the only one in the book who got close to figuring it all out. If that is what we would call her revelations, if we want to call them that. More like confused and muddled thoughts that never actually gained any coherency.As you can probably tell, I hated this book. I hated it so much that I tried to sell it back to Powell's, but not even Powell's would take it, thus it sits on my floor constantly reminding me of all the time wasted that could have been spent reading Junot Diaz's new book, This Is How You Lose Her (review forthcoming). If you want to read a classic, don't read this one. Unless you're into all the things I hate. In that case, go for it.

[tobereadpile · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I had such great expectations about this book, but unfortunately it left me disappointed. While i appreciate why this would have been considered a banned book, i found it incredibly tedious and superfluous. I suppose these issues aren't as relevant or taboo in today's society as they were back then, which could be why it failed to impact me. I am looking forward to the 2015 film adaptation though, cause, hey, Richard Madden.