Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence

When aristocrat Clifford returns from the war, paralysed from the waist down, his wife Connie Chatterley becomes isolated and despairs of the post-war years, yearning for human connection among the emotionally dead intellectuals that surround her. When the aloof, but noble, Oliver Mellors returns to the estate as gamekeeper, Connie begins an affair, feeling that she has connected in a sensual, primordial way for the first time.

Hugely controversial at the time of its publication, Lawrence’s exploration of class differences and love and his celebration of sexuality resonates against his view of the repressed modern condition.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover has been controversial since the moment it was published. It involves not only brazen infidelity but also obscene language that readers of the 1920s would likely have been shocked to read. As a result, it was published only privately in Italy and France and banned in the United Kingdom. When it was eventually published in the United Kingdom, it was the subject of a public prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act 1959, which Penguin Books (as the book’s publisher) won and which in turn represented the beginning of the liberalisation of publishing.

When reading this book, I realised that there isn’t actually much literature about women’s experiences of the aftermath of the First World War. In some ways it’s quite right that the literature is largely focused on the men that went to fight as they were the ones forced to experience hideous, traumatic events and suffer life-changing injuries, both physical (like Clifford in this book) and mental. Although their wives then cared for them when they returned, it is perhaps unsurprising that the focus is usually on the men in literature of this time. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is one book which bucks that trend, with Lucrezia Warren Smith in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway being another, trying constantly to reassure her husband when he is suffering from shellshock.

Controversial as Lady Chatterley’s Lover is, I found it actually quite a sad story. Lady Chatterley feels trapped and lonely, caring for her injured husband in a large house in a remote area of England which she dislikes. She seeks to fill the void elsewhere rather than accepting what she fears will be a lifetime of boredom and unfulfillment.

I always find it interesting to read a book written from the perspective of an ‘anti-hero’ acting in an objectively morally incorrect way. Like Lolita, The Picture of Dorian Gray and many others, we find ourselves sympathising with the protagonist but then questioning our own judgment in doing so. Lady Chatterley’s feelings and behaviour go entirely against what the world expects of spouses as a whole, and especially post-war wives, but equally we know how unhappy she is and how much she looks forward to her liaisons with Oliver Mellors.

I doubt I was as scandalised by this book as readers of nearly a century ago were, probably thanks to the consequences of the aforementioned trial against Penguin Books. I also felt that it was written in a particular style which, in my mind, did not flow as well as some other books of the same era. However, it’s certainly worth a read, even if it’s simply to see why it was banned.