Lady Chatterley's Lover is the final novel by the English author D. H. Lawrence, first published privately in 1928, in Florence, Italy, and in 1929, in Paris, France. An unexpurgated edition was not published openly in the United Kingdom until 1960, when it was the subject of a watershed obscenity trial against the publisher Penguin Books, which won the case and quickly sold three million copies. The book was also banned for obscenity in the United States, Canada, Australia, India and Japan. The book soon became notorious for its story of the physical (and emotional) relationship between a working-class man and an upper-class woman, its explicit descriptions of sex and its use of then-unprintable profane words.
Background Lawrence's life, including his own relationship with his upper-class wife, Frieda, and his childhood in Nottinghamshire, influenced the novel. According to some critics, the fling of Lady Ottoline Morrell with "Tiger", a young stonemason who came to carve plinths for her garden statues, also influenced the story.. Lawrence, who had once considered calling the novel John Thomas and Lady Jane in reference to the male and the female sex organs, made significant alterations to the text and story in the process of its composition.
Lawrence allegedly read the manuscript of Maurice by E. M. Forster, which was written in 1914 but published posthumously in 1971. That novel, although it is about a homosexual couple, also involves a gamekeeper becoming the lover of a member of the upper classes.Delaveny, Emile (1971). D. H. Lawrence and Edward Carpenter: A Study in Edwardian Transition. New York: Taplinger Publishing Company.
Synopsis The story concerns a young married woman, the former Constance Reid (Lady Chatterley), whose upper-class baronet husband, Sir Clifford Chatterley is paralysed from the waist down because of a Great War injury. Constance has an affair with the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, which develops into a serious relationship. The class difference between the couple highlights a major motif of the novel. The central theme is Constance's realisation that she cannot love with the mind alone. That realisation stems from a heightened sexual experience that Constance has felt only with Mellors, suggesting that love requires the elements of both body and mind. The novel has a somewhat open ending with Constance and Mellors facing an uncertain future, she pregnant by him, and Sir Clifford unwilling to divorce his wife.
Characters Constance, Lady Chatterley (Connie): The main character of the novel. Connie, who is an intellectual and socially progressive, is married to the cold and passionless Sir Clifford Chatterley. She falls in love with the gamekeeper Oliver Mellors and establishes a sexual bond with him. Having lived until then with a disappointing experience of her own sexuality, she matures as a sensual being and eventually leaves her husband.
Sir Clifford Chatterley, Bt: Connie's wealthy, handsome and well-built but paralyzed and impotent husband. Clifford, who is a successful writer and businessman, is emotionally cold and focused on material success. He looks down on the lower classes and feels they should remain in their place. Conscious of his inability to father an heir, Clifford is prepared to tolerate his wife seeking sexual satisfaction elsewhere and could even accept a child by another man, as long as appearances are kept up. Over the course of the story, Clifford becomes increasingly dependent on his nurse, Mrs. Bolton.
Oliver Mellors: The gamekeeper at Clifford Chatterley's estate, formerly an officer in the colonial army. Cold, intelligent, and noble in spirit, Mellors has endured a miserable marriage and now lives a quiet life alone, estranged from his wife and child. Mellors detests industrial modernity and nurses a dread of the future which makes him withdrawn. His relationship with Connie rekindles his passion for life. At the end of the novel, he plans to marry Connie.
Mrs. Ivy Bolton: Clifford's nurse. She is a middle-aged, complex, and intelligent woman. Her husband died in an accident in the mines owned by Clifford's family. Mrs. Bolton both admires and despises Clifford, and their relationship is intricate.
Michaelis: A successful Irish playwright. He has a brief relationship with Connie and proposes to her, but Connie sees him as a slave to success and devoid of passion.
Hilda Reid: Connie's older sister by two years. Hilda shares the same intellectual upbringing as Connie, but she looks down on Connie's relationship with Mellors due to his lower-class status. However, she eventually supports Connie.
Sir Malcolm Reid: The father of Connie and Hilda. He is a renowned painter and a sensual aesthete. He finds Clifford weak and immediately warms to Mellors.
Tommy Dukes: Clifford's friend and a brigadier general in the British army. He talks about the importance of sensuality but is personally detached from sexuality, only engaging in intellectual discussions.
Charles May, Hammond, Berry: Clifford's young intellectual friends. They visit Wragby and participate in meaningless discussions about love and sex.
Duncan Forbes: Connie and Hilda's artist friend. He paints abstract art, and at one point was in love with Connie. Connie initially claims she is pregnant with his child.
Bertha Coutts: Mellors' wife. Although she doesn't appear in the novel, her presence is felt. Separated from Mellors due to sexual incompatibility, she spreads rumors about Mellors, leading to his dismissal from his job.
Squire Winter: A relative of Clifford. He strongly believes in the old privileges of the aristocracy.
Daniele and Giovanni: Venetian gondoliers who serve Hilda and Connie. Giovanni hopes the women will pay him to have sex with them, but he is disappointed. Daniele reminds Connie of Mellors, as he is seen as a "real man."
Themes Mind and body Richard Hoggart argues that the main subject of Lady Chatterley's Lover is not the explicit sexuality, which was the subject of much debate, but the search for integrity and wholeness.. Key to this integrity is cohesion between the mind and the body, for "body without mind is brutish; mind without body... is a running away from our double being". Lady Chatterley's Lover focuses on the incoherence of living a life that is "all mind", which Lawrence found to be particularly true among the young members of the aristocratic classes, as in his description of Constance's and her sister Hilda's "tentative love-affairs" in their youth:
The contrast between mind and body can be seen in the dissatisfaction each character experiences in their previous relationships, such as Constance's lack of intimacy with her husband, who is "all mind", and Mellors's choice to live apart from his wife because of her "brutish" sexual nature. The dissatisfactions lead them into a relationship that develops very slowly and is based upon tenderness, physical passion, and mutual respect. As the relationship between Lady Chatterley and Mellors builds, they learn more about the interrelation of the mind and the body. She learns that sex is more than a shameful and disappointing act, and he learns about the spiritual challenges that come from physical love.
Jenny Turner maintained in The Sexual Imagination from Acker to Zola: A Feminist Companion (1993) that the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover broke "the taboo on explicit representations of sexual acts in British and North American literature". She described the novel as "a book of great libertarian energy and heteroerotic beauty".
Class Lady Chatterley's Lover also presents some views on the early-20th-century British social context. That is most evidently seen in the plot on the affair of an aristocratic woman (Connie) with a working-class man (Mellors). That is heightened when Mellors adopts the local broad Derbyshire dialect, something he can slip into and out of. The critic and writer Mark Schorer writes of the forbidden love of a woman of relatively superior social situation who is drawn to an "outsider", a man of a lower social rank or a foreigner. He considers that to be a familiar construction in Lawrence's works in which the woman either resists her impulse or yields to it.. Schorer believes that the two possibilities were embodied, respectively, in the situation into which Lawrence was born and that into which Lawrence married, which becomes a favourite topic in his work.
There is a clear class divide between the inhabitants of Wragby and Tevershall that is bridged by the nurse Mrs Bolton. Clifford is more self assured in his position, but Connie is often thrown when the villagers treat her as a Lady like when she has tea in the village. This is often made explicit in the narration such as here:
There are also signs of dissatisfaction and resentment from the Tevershall coal pit colliers, whose fortunes are in decline, against Clifford, who owns the mines. Involved with hard, dangerous and health-threatening employment, the unionised and self-supporting pit-village communities in Britain have been home to more pervasive class barriers than has been the case in other industries (for an example, see chapter 2 of The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell.) They were also centres of widespread Nonconformism (Non-Anglican Protestantism), which hold proscriptive views on sexual sins such as adultery. References to the concepts of anarchism, socialism, communism and capitalism permeate the book. Union strikes were also a constant preoccupation in Wragby Hall.
Coal mining is a recurrent and familiar theme in Lawrence's life and writing because of his background, and it is prominent also in Sons and Lovers and Women in Love and short stories such as Odour of Chrysanthemums.
Industrialisation and nature As in much of the rest of Lawrence's fiction, a key theme is the contrast between the vitality of nature and the mechanised monotony of mining and industrialism. Clifford wants to reinvigorate the mines with new technology and is out of touch with the living natural world, even though he identifies romantically with his status as aristocratic custodian of his country estate. In contrast, Connie often appreciates the beauty of nature and sees the ugliness of the mines in Uthwaite. Her heightened sensual appreciation applies to both nature and her sexual relationship with Mellors. Mellors for his part expresses disgust for the "mechanized greed" of modernity, for money and the ruling classes, and is on the other hand disappointed in the workers who seem to have lost their "pagan" vital spark and degenerated into consumerism.
Censorship A publisher's note in the 2001 Random House Inc. edition of the novel states that Lawrence "was unable to secure a commercial publication [of] the novel in its unexpurgated form". The author privately published the novel in 2000 copies to his subscribers in England, the United States and France in 1928. Later that same year, the second edition was privately published in 200 copies. Then, pirated copies of the novel were made.
An edition of the novel was published in Britain in 1932 by Martin Secker, two years after Lawrence's death. Reviewing it in The Observer, the journalist Gerald Gould noted that "passages are necessarily omitted to which the author undoubtedly attached supreme psychological importance—importance so great, that he was willing to face obloquy and misunderstanding and censorship because of them"."New Novels", The Observer, 28 February 1932, p. 6. An authorised and heavily censored abridgment was published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. also in 1932. That edition was subsequently reissued in paperback in the United States by Signet Books in 1946.
British obscenity trial