Lady Chatterley's Lover
by D. H. Lawrence
Summary
Constance Chatterley, married to the wealthy Sir Clifford Chatterley since before a war wound left him paralyzed from the waist down and unable to have children, begins an affair with Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on the family estate, a relationship neither of them treats lightly even as it breaks every rule of the class both of them were raised inside. Lawrence writes the affair as something closer to a repair than a scandal, Connie rediscovering a physical aliveness that her marriage to Clifford, and the industrial England he represents, has starved out of her, while Clifford himself grows steadily more absorbed in running his coal mines and less interested in Connie as anything but a useful wife. The novel follows the relationship openly and at length rather than glancing away from it, and by its end Connie is pregnant with Mellors's child, the two of them separated for a time, she in Scotland and he working on a farm, both waiting on divorces neither spouse is eager to grant; Clifford in particular refuses outright to release Connie, leaving the novel to close without the marriage its lovers actually want.
Lawrence treats the physical relationship between Connie and Mellors as inseparable from his larger argument about what industrial England has done to ordinary bodily life, refusing to write the sex scenes with any of the coyness contemporary fiction usually reached for. The novel reads directly and without much plot incident beyond the relationship itself, and its frankness, more than any single event in the story, is what makes it still feel unusually candid a century later.
No British publisher would touch the manuscript, so Lawrence had it privately printed in Florence in 1928, in a run of roughly a thousand copies, smuggling many of them into Britain by hand and through the mail.
Historical Context & Significance
No literary prize was ever associated with Lady Chatterley's Lover, and Lawrence, who died in 1930, received none for it or for any other book in his lifetime. Martin Secker published a heavily expurgated authorized British edition in 1932; The Observer's Gerald Gould reviewed it with real regret, noting that passages had necessarily been omitted to which the author undoubtedly attached supreme psychological importance, a critic mourning the book that censorship would not let him actually read.
The full, unexpurgated novel did not appear legally in Britain until 1960, when Penguin printed it and was prosecuted under the newly passed Obscene Publications Act. The jury returned a verdict of not guilty on November 2 of that year, deciding that the novel's literary merit outweighed any obscenity, and Penguin put the book on sale eight days later. It sold three million copies in the months that followed, a verdict and a sales figure arriving together thirty two years after the first printing had gone out in a run small enough to smuggle by hand.