Lady Chatterley’s Lover—Who has really read it?

Lady Chatterley’s Lover

By D.H. Lawrence

Published: privately in 1928, 1929, and 1930; edited version in the UK in 1932; first unexpurgated edition by Penguin House in the UK 1960

Read: June 2024

This novel is among those that everyone “knows” about but not so many have read.  Lawrence had to publish it privately to get it into the public’s hands.  A heavily edited version was published in the UK two years after Lawrence’s death.  It wasn’t until 1960 that an unexpurgated edition was published in the UK by Penguin House.  The publishing house was tried in a very public case for publishing obscenity but won and published a new edition in 1961.  The book was banned in many countries, including the US.  The US ban was overturned in 1959 and was read widely in the 1960’s as the US culture was undergoing a significant shift in its view of women and sex freedom. 

What made this book so appalling?  Two quotes found in the Wikipedia article on the book  (1) are quite telling: “I’ve not taken ten minutes on Lady Chatterley’s Lover, outside of looking at its opening pages. It is most damnable! It is written by a man with a diseased mind and a soul so black that he would obscure even the darkness of hell!”  (Senator Reed-Smoot in 1930) and “is this the kind of book “you would wish your wife or servants to read” (Mervyn Griffith-Jones, chief prosecutor in the Penguin House trial, 1960).   As usual, a banned book that hasn’t really been read and a paternalistic comment.  In the US trial, this book apparently established a standard of “redeeming social or literary merit” when assessing material to be banned as obscene. (1)

So what did this reader find when reading this potentially obscene novel nearly 100 years after it was published privately? 

In the opening chapter we learn that the protagonist, Lady Constance Chatterley (at that time just Connie), and her older sister had some sexual interactions with boys while they were teenagers.  So here in the first chapter is the first content considered objectionable—teenage girls having sex.  Not only that, but Connie also considered sex the least interesting aspect of her interaction with her lovers—the dialog with the boy being the most engaging.  And then Connie reflects on the sex act in ways a Senator Reed-Smoot may not have appreciated. 

Connie marries “up” to Sir Clifford Chatterley while he is home on leave and they have a month’s honeymoon.  Unfortunately, the honeymoon does not result in a pregnancy as desired by her father-in-law which is a problem as her husband returns from the Great War paralyzed from the waist down and impotent thus ending their sex life before it hardly started.  They move to his country estate, which is rather isolated, her only other human interactions with people who visit him, and the servants.  In time, her husband decides he would like to have an heir, and he tells her so.  The implication is clear—have sex with someone else—of acceptable class.    She eventually has an unsatisfactory affair with one of them. 

Eventually Connie meets her lover, the estate’s gamekeeper (not the gardener!).  The book does become much more steamy here as she moves from having sex done to her (with permission) to making love with her lover. 

Although this book is quite steamy at times, there is more going on in this book than that including expectations of parents for grandchildren, class issues, what’s right and wrong for men vs women. 

This reader looks forward to an interesting discussion of this book next season. 

Leave a comment