This book was first self-published by D. H. Lawrence in Florence, Italy in 1928. It was banned from publication in Great Britain until 1960. It was not published in its original form in this country until 1959. It was considered much too pornographic, however it is pornographic the way Playboy is. You have a mass of text, and then there will be a racy passage. I say racy as by today’s standards it is all rather mild. Lawrence spends more time dealing with the emotionally altered state that good sex brings on than a physical description of sex. Most of such passages are relatively mild.
“All the while he spoke he exquisitely stroked the rounded tail, till it seemed as if a slippery sort of fire came from it into his hands. And his finger-tips touched the two secret openings to her body, time after time, with a soft little brush of fire.”
On the whole I would call it more erotic than pornographic.
“He dropped the shirt and stood still looking towards her. The sun through the low window sent in a beam that lit up his thighs and slim belly and the erect phallos rising darkish and hot-looking from the little cloud of vivid gold-red hair. She was startled and afraid.
’How strange!’ she said slowly. ‘How strange he stands there! So big! and so dark and cock-sure! Is he like that?’
The man looked down the front of his slender white body, and laughed. Between the slim breasts the hair was dark, almost black. But at the root of the belly, where the phallos rose thick and arching, it was gold-red, vivid in a little cloud.
’So proud!’ she murmured, uneasy. ‘And so lordly! Now I know why men are so overbearing! But he’s lovely, REALLY.Like another being! A bit terrifying! But lovely really! And he comes to ME!—’ She caught her lower lip between her teeth, in fear and excitement.”
Another reason it was considered pornographic was Lawrence’s use of not- for-mixed-company language. However, the way he inserted such language into the novel struck me much like a current teen movie that feels obligated to include a set number of F-bombs. Sometimes, they went with the flow of the novel, sometimes it felt like they were there just for the shock value.
The gist of the story is this. Lady Constance (Connie) Chatterly is from a Scottish middle class family of artistic bent. She marries young to Clifford Chatterly, a minor noble, a baron. He is also an owner of coal mines. This and his nobility put him in the upper class. As I read these types of novels and even current literature from England, I am left with the impression that class is very important in England.
After a brief time together after their wedding he goes off to WW I and comes back a shattered man. There is a long convalescence from which he comes through as a paraplegic bound to a wheel chair, needing help with most of the common human routines. Connie stands by her man, and they eventually end up back at Wragby, the ancestral estate. It is an ugly, rambling mansion that Connie comes to loathe. Clifford begins to make a name for himself in literary circles and achieves a level of minor fame. Later in the book, under the influence of Mrs. Bolton, he puts that part of his life on a back burner and devotes himself to improving the mines with a passion. Coal mining is a theme that runs throughout all of the Lawrence’s novels that I have read. This is understandable as he came from a collier family.
Lady Chatterly is a young woman whose needs are not getting met. Her father suggests to Clifford that his wife might be happier if she took a lover. At another time Clifford is lamenting that there is not an heir to the Chatterly name and suggests to Connie:
“’It would almost be a good thing if you had a child by another man, he said. ‘If we brought it up at Wragby, it would belong to us and to the place. I don’t believe very intensely in fatherhood. If we had the child to rear, it would be our own, and it would carry on. Don’t you think it’s worth considering?”
She does have a less than satisfying affair with an Irish playwright, Michaelis. He is not portrayed as the best of lovers, and as a rather vain, crude man loving the things that popular success brings him. However, despite his fame and success he is never quite accepted as an equal in upper class society.
Enter Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper for Wragby and thus an employee of Clifford. He lives in a small cottage an easy walk from the mansion. Connie begins to encounter him on her walks around the estate. She discovers the little shed next to the coops where he is raising pheasants to restock the estate and begins to spend time there. Eventually, they end up as lovers almost by accident. Mellors is certainly not looking for a romance as he has been burned one time too many. He is certainly not after the Lady of the Manor!
He is a lover as such she has never experienced before and she eventually falls in love with him. It takes him a bit longer to admit that he does indeed love her. The affair begins a little slowly then takes on the urgency that these things frequently do. She becomes pregnant not from any plan, but from a lack of planning.
About this time another woman comes into the picture, Mrs. Bolton. She is a nurse who has spent years taking care of the colliers in the coal mining town. She has a hate and reverence for the upper class.
“The masters! In a dispute between masters and men, she was always for the men. But when there was no question of contest, she was pining to be superior, to be one of the upper class. The upper classes fascinated her, appealing to her peculiar English passion for superiority. She was thrilled to come to Wragby; thrilled to talk to Lady Chatterley, my word, different from the common colliers’ wives! She said so in so many words. Yet one could see a grudge against the Chatterleys peep out in her; the grudge against the masters.”
Mrs. Bolton comes as Connie has become less willing to take care of Clifford in the intimate, menial ways required. Clifford is unwilling to submit to a man doing these chores. Mrs. Bolton is the first to become aware of Connie’s affair, but keeps it to herself, mainly so as to not upset Clifford.
As Connie’s love of Mellors grows, so does her abhorrence of Clifford. She goes off to Venice for a vacation with her sister and father. This is for several reasons, one of which is to give her time to reflect on her position. She tells her sister of the affair who is absolutely horrified as he is not of her class.
“’But you’ll be through with him in awhile,’ she said, ‘and then you’ll be ashamed of having been connected with him. One CAN’T mix up with the working people.’”
She tells her father later on, and his reaction is much the same.
As the relationship between Mellors and Connie grows, so does the intimacy between Ms. Bolton and Clifford even though she is not of his class, and somewhat older than him. Interestingly enough towards the end of novel this relationship takes on a bit of a sexual nature even though Clifford is not able to consummate anything. Ms. Bolton participates with increasing distaste for Clifford. Not surprisingly, her reverence for the upper classes has evaporated much earlier in the narrative. What a dangerous thing is familiarity.
Connie and Mellors have resolved to have a life together, and in order to do so they must rid themselves of their current entanglements. As it turns out Mellors is long separated, but not divorced from his wife. When the affair comes out (as they almost always do), Clifford is appalled. It is not so much the affair itself as he more or less encouraged her to have one, but that it is with a lower class man, one of his employees. As with her family, he just finds this scandalous.
So Mellors wife is not granting a divorce easily as she is without a man in her life currently and needs Mellors to support her. Clifford is not agreeable to divorce as he is appalled at Connie’s selection and is bound to make a point of control with her. Given the divorce laws of the time, Mellors must be of impeccable behavior. Connie leaves Clifford. Mellors, surprise, must leave Wragby. The two live apart, and communicate by letter. Connie’s father meets Mellors at Connie’s arrangement, and the two male-bond over dinner and many drinks. The couple also manages to have another tryst.
The novel ends with Mellors writing a letter to Connie about their future. Unlike so many of Lawrence’s novels this one ends hopefully.
I suppose this book might have been considered pornographic as it was pushing back at the British idea of class. An affair between a Lady and a gamekeeper and in the end she chooses the gamekeeper and the simpler life he can provide. How scandalous. It so explores socialistic themes which at this period of history in Britain and the United States were not in favor. Add to that theme the exploration of the industrialization of England and its resultant change of the old order.
“This is history. One England blots out another. The mines had made the halls wealthy. Now they were blotting them out, as they had already blotted out the cottages. The industrial England blots out the agricultural England. One meaning blots out another. The new England blots out the old England. And the continuity is not Organic, but mechanical.
Connie, belonging to the leisured classes, had clung to the remnants of the old England. It had taken her years to realize that it was really blotted out by this terrifying new and gruesome England, and that the blotting out would go on till it was complete.”
There are many reasons to read this novel. D. H. Lawrence writes wonderful, poetic prose. It is a good romance novel. It is a wonderful picture of England between the wars. It is an exploration of the themes touched on above. However, it you are looking for some titillating pornography you should look elsewhere.
Many adaptations of the story:
- Lady Chatterley (1993) (TV Mini-Series)
- Lady Chatterley (2006) – A French adaptation of the second (and much less well-known) version of D.H. Lawrence’s erotic tale.
- Lady Chatterley’s Lover (2015) (TV Movie)
- Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1981)
- Lady Chatterly’s Ghost (2011) (TV Movie) – Again not the novel, but uses the novel as a jumping off point.
- Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1955)
- A plethora of XXX rated movies that have vague ties to the idea of the novel’s romance