Lady Chatterleys Lover

Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1993) – D. H. Lawrence
Penguin | ISBN: 9780140175219
Condition: As New | Sold by Crappy Old Books

Sex, scandal, class warfare and the extraordinary British ability to become profoundly upset about what consenting adults get up to behind closed doors. Few novels have managed to offend so many respectable people while simultaneously becoming one of the most celebrated works of twentieth-century literature. Indeed, for a considerable period, merely possessing a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was enough to suggest that one’s moral standards had taken a distinctly worrying turn.

Welcome to D. H. Lawrence’s notorious masterpiece, a novel that combines forbidden passion, social criticism and frank discussion of human sexuality with enough controversy to keep lawyers, bishops and newspaper editors spectacularly busy.

Lady Constance Chatterley inhabits the privileged world of the English aristocracy, married to Sir Clifford Chatterley, a wealthy landowner left paralysed by injuries sustained during the First World War.

Their marriage offers financial security, social position and all the outward advantages of upper-class existence. Unfortunately, it provides rather less in the way of emotional warmth, physical intimacy and genuine human connection.

Enter Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on the Chatterley estate, a man whose relationship with Constance rapidly develops beyond the ordinary professional boundaries of estate management.

Mellors is not merely an attractive alternative to her emotionally distant husband. He represents an entirely different world, one associated with physical vitality, natural instincts and the possibility of escaping the suffocating conventions of class-conscious English society.

Naturally, this causes complications.

The affair challenges the rigid boundaries separating aristocracy and working class, exposing the hypocrisies of a social order in which wealth and respectability are frequently mistaken for virtue.

Lawrence explores the tensions between industrial civilisation and nature, intellect and instinct, social obligation and personal fulfilment. Beneath the novel’s famous sexual passages lies a serious examination of alienation, emotional repression and the damaging consequences of a society increasingly disconnected from genuine human experience.

Unfortunately for Lawrence, much of the British establishment became rather more interested in the rude words.

Written in 1928 and initially published privately in Italy, the novel remained unavailable in an unexpurgated British edition until Penguin’s famous publication in 1960.

The resulting obscenity trial became a landmark in British cultural history, with prosecutors attempting to demonstrate that the book would corrupt public morals. Penguin was acquitted, and the novel rapidly became a bestseller.

There is something magnificently ironic about a literary work concerned with the importance of human intimacy becoming the subject of a national argument about whether ordinary people could be trusted to read it.

This 1993 Penguin edition, offered in As New condition by Crappy Old Books, is an excellent acquisition for admirers of classic English literature, collectors of controversial fiction and readers interested in the changing relationship between literature, censorship and social attitudes.

A passionate, provocative and intellectually challenging novel that remains far more substantial than its scandalous reputation might suggest.

Because Lawrence wanted to explore the human condition, the destructive effects of industrial society and the relationship between physical love and emotional fulfilment.

The British establishment, meanwhile, wanted to know whether the gamekeeper was behaving himself.

He wasn’t.

And English literature has never quite recovered.

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