SparkNotes: Lady Chatterley's Lover: Characters Lady Chatterley's Lover Summary Section I: Chapters 1-3 Lady Chatterley - The protagonist of the novel. Before her marriage, she is simply Constance Reid, an intellectual and social progressive, the daughter of Sir Malcolm and the sister of Hilda. When she marries Clifford Chatterley, a minor nobleman, Constance--or, as she is known throughout the novel, Connie--assumes his title, becoming Lady Chatterley. Lady Chatterley's Lover chronicles Connie's maturation as a woman and as a sensual being. She comes to despise her weak, ineffectual husband, and to love Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on her husband's estate. In the process of leaving her husband and conceiving a child with Mellors, Lady Chatterley moves from the heartless, bloodless world of the intelligentsia and aristocracy into a vital and profound connection rooted in sensuality and sexual fulfillment. Oliver Mellors - The lover in the novel's title. Mellors is the gamekeeper on Clifford Chatterley's estate, Wragby. He is aloof, sarcastic, intelligent and noble.

He was born near Wragby, and worked as a blacksmith until he ran off to the army to escape an unhappy marriage. In the army he rose to become a commissioned lieutenant--an unusual position for a member of the working classes--but was forced to leave the army because of a case of pneumonia, which left him in poor health. Disappointed by a string of unfulfilling love affairs, Mellors lives in quiet isolation, from which he is redeemed by his relationship with Connie: the passion unleashed by their lovemaking forges a profound bond between them. At the end of the novel, Mellors is fired from his job as gamekeeper and works as a laborer on a farm, waiting for a divorce from his old wife so he can marry Connie. Mellors is the representative in this novel of the Noble Savage: he is a man with an innate nobility but who remains impervious to the pettiness and emptiness of conventional society, with access to a primitive flame of passion and sensuality. Clifford Chatterley - Connie's husband. Clifford Chatterley is a minor nobleman who becomes paralyzed from the waist down during World War I.

As a result of his injury, Clifford is impotent. He retires to his familial estate, Wragby, where he becomes first a successful writer, and then a powerful businessman. But the gap between Connie and him grows ever wider; obsessed with financial success and fame, he is not truly interested in love, and she feels that he has become passionless and empty. He turns for solace to his nurse and companion, Mrs. Bolton, who worships him as a nobleman even as she despises him for his casual arrogance. Clifford represents everything that this novel despises about the modern English nobleman: he is a weak, vain man, but declares his right to rule the lower classes, and he soullessly pursues money and fame through industry and the meaningless manipulation of words. His impotence is symbolic of his failings as a strong, sensual man. Mrs. Bolton - Ivy Bolton is Clifford's nurse and caretaker. She is a competent, complex, still-attractive middle-aged woman. Years before the action in this novel, her husband died in an accident in the mines owned by Clifford's family. Even as Mrs.

Bolton resents Clifford as the owner of the mines--and, in a sense, the murderer of her husband--she still maintains a worshipful attitude towards him as the representative of the upper class. Her relationship with Clifford--she simultaneously adores and despises him, while he depends and looks down on her--is probably the most fascinating and complex relationship in the novel. Michaelis - A successful Irish playwright with whom Connie has an affair early in the novel. Michaelis asks Connie to marry him, but she decides not to, realizing that he is like all other intellectuals: a slave to success, a purveyor of vain ideas and empty words, passionless. Hilda Reid - Connie's older sister by two years, the daughter of Sir Malcolm. Hilda shared Connie's cultured upbringing and intellectual education. She remains unliberated by the raw sensuality that changed Connie's life. She disdains Connie's lover, Mellors, as a member of the lower classes, but in the end she helps Connie to leave Clifford. Sir Malcolm Reid - The father of Connie and Hilda.

He is an acclaimed painter, an aesthete and unabashed sensualist who despises Clifford for his weakness and impotence, and who immediately warms to Mellors. Tommy Dukes - One of Clifford's contemporaries, Tommy Dukes is a brigadier general in the British Army and a clever and progressive intellectual. Lawrence intimates, however, that Dukes is a representative of all intellectuals: all talk and no action. Dukes speaks of the importance of sensuality, but he himself is incapable of sensuality and uninterested in sex. Charles May, Hammond, Berry - Young intellectuals who visit Wragby, and who, along with Tommy Dukes and Clifford, participate in the socially progressive but ultimately meaningless discussions about love and sex. Duncan Forbes - An artist friend of Connie and Hilda. Forbes paints abstract canvases, a form of art both Mellors and D.H. Lawrence seem to despise. He once loved Connie, and Connie originally claims to be pregnant with his child. Bertha Coutts - Although Bertha never actually appears in the novel, her presence is felt. She is Mellors' wife, separated from him but not divorced.

Their marriage faltered because of their sexual incompatibility: she was too rapacious, not tender enough. She returns at the end of the novel to spread rumors about Mellors' infidelity to her, and helps get him fired from his position as gamekeeper. As the novel concludes, Mellors is in the process of divorcing her. Squire Winter - A relative of Clifford. He is a firm believer in the old privileges of the aristocracy. Daniele, Giovanni - Venetian gondoliers in the service of Hilda and Connie. Giovanni hopes that the women will pay him to sleep with them; he is disappointed. Daniele reminds Connie of Mellors: he is attractive, a "real man." Doris Lessing on Lady Chatterley's Lover | Books | The Guardian Share on Messenger Close Lady Chatterley is as alive in the popular imagination as is naked Lady Godiva riding on her horse through Coventry, hiding behind the curtains of her hair.

But Lady Godiva was a heroine of purity and integrity, and most people were ashamed to take even a peek at her, whereas Lady Chatterley is always good for a laugh, or rather a dirty snigger: Lady Chatterley and her bit of rough. Because of DH Lawrence , any comic has only to mention game- keepers to get a laugh, and what an irony, for Lawrence was preaching sex as a kind of sacrament, and more than that, one that would save us all from the results of war and the nastinesses of our civilisation. "Doing dirt on sex," he anathematised; "it is the crime of our times, because what we need is tenderness towards the body, towards sex, we need tender-hearted fucking." So he went on, but what happened? He stands for dirt and the snigger, at least on the popular level. Many novels do not gain by relating them to their times. Others, usually the polemical kind, may only be understood in context, and Lady Chatterley's Lover is one.

To read it unenlightened, particularly the feverish third version, can only leave the reader wondering what on earth is all this urgent preaching about, particularly now, when it is hard even to remember what a mealy-mouthed society Lawrence was writing in. It was prudish, repressed and priggish, and as always in such a time the dirty snigger was never far away. The three versions of Lady Chatterley's Lover were written in the four years before his death. It was his way to completely rewrite, not so much as revision as a fresh vision. He valued the liveliness of the new more than a reworking. We may argue that the third version is not the best, and many people have, but it is the one Lawrence took his stand on. It is the most emotional, insistent, urgent: perhaps it is the intensity of the novel that has earned Lawrence his reputation as a sex-obsessed writer. So, what were the circumstances? First, he was dying of tuberculosis, but he was, as we put it, in denial, though it had been properly diagnosed, and with part of his mind he knew the truth.

He had always had "a weak chest": in those days this was often a euphemism for tuberculosis. Even as a young man he had suffered all kinds of pneumonia, bronchitis, colds, coughs. It looks as if he succumbed to the great flu epidemic of 1918-19. Yet he refused to admit to tuberculosis, talked of his bronchials, his colds, his coughs, he had caught a chill - anything but TB. And this was strange in a man who valued the truth, and clear thinking and speaking, particularly on physical matters. Before Lady Chatterley's Lover he had earned the reputation of a sexual crusader. His novels and tales had been banned, confiscated, caused scandals. He was sometimes reviewed more in sorrow than in anger: such talents, allied with such grossness - this was often the tone of literary criticism of him and his work. Women in Love had particularly shocked people. He was always in an embattled position, defending, attacking, being defended by others. He had the temperament that goes with tuberculosis: hypersensitive, excitable. Very irritable, are these sufferers, given to explosions of temper. They know their time is short.

They are reminded of their deaths with every rattling breath, every cough. The incessant coughing of Lawrence's later years got him thrown out of hotels, meant he had to choose his lodgings with care. As a young man Lawrence had been proud of his body, his "weak chest" notwithstanding. What comes out of the earlier novels, particularly The White Peacock, is the picture of a youth at home in the countryside, with friends, alert to every bird, animal, insect, plant. He could have said with John Clare, "I love wild things almost to foolishness." This body-proud countryman with "a weak chest" became the man whose rotting body filled him with miserable self-loathing. So many weltering aggravating emotions were at work in this very ill man as he wrote and rewrote Lady Chatterley's Lover His wife Frieda was having an affair with a lusty Italian, and Lawrence knew it. Never the most tactful of women, she did not go out of her way to conceal her assignations. She did not spare his feelings in anything. She is supposed to have told friends that Lawrence had been impotent since 1926.

Tuberculosis does two unkind contradictory things: it heightens sexuality and its feverish imaginings, and it causes impotence. The sexual life of these two was always noisily combative; nothing secretive about it. Friends, visitors and the enamoured acolytes Lawrence attracted were informed about the stages of their love and their love- making, in prose and in verse - Lawrence wrote about everything, what he thought, what he did, all the time, in letters to friends everywhere, in talk. Frieda complained to sisters, ex-lovers, friends, about his sexuality. He did not satisfy her, he was really more homosexual than normal. Frieda was a woman who had had, and would have, many lovers: she got Lawrence into bed within a few minutes of their first meeting. In spite of all her earthiness and her expertise, he retained some ideas not far off the mystical. He always believed that nothing would do in lovemaking but the mutual orgasm. "We came off together that time" - or words to that effect, occur in more than one of his tales. Some of his fantasies, as exposed in Lady Chatterley's Lover, were those of a romantic boy.

This was a sexually ignorant time to the point that these days it is hard to remember it or understand it. Lawrence did not know about the clitoris, which he called "a beak". A beak that rubbed and tore "in the old stagers, particularly". To him the clitoris was a weapon, against the male. This level of ignorance about the clitoris was common. It would be mentioned in sex manuals without emphasis, or not mentioned at all. As for me, I learned of the clitoris from Balzac - not of its existence or its uses, but that it was part of the lexicon of love, with a status. Lawrence knew everything about the G-spot, though he would not have heard the term and probably would have found the idea of localising it and naming it abhorrent. The vaginal orgasm at its best, as described by him - his informant must have been one of his lovers - is as accurate as his talk about the clitoris is ignorant. But we are in an emotional battlefield here: Lawrence came too quickly, said Frieda, and then, complained Lawrence, she had to bring herself to orgasm with the aid of the pesky clit.

But with sexual accomplishment as a banner of progress in this polemical war, what they said in their times of complaint was probably not more than the half of it. When Lawrence discovered anal sex, things went well, for him at least, though his amiable pet name for her was "shitbag". If the lovemaking in Lady Chatterley is a mix of the misleading and the wonderful, then the talk, as reported from the ranch in Taos, the quarrels, the gossip, was repellent. While Lawrence was shocking and thrilling the world with his novels and tales, visitors to the ranch were often disappointed and even driven away from the couple because of the violence, sometimes the sheer nastiness of it all. Visitors might report that Lawrence would "punish" Frieda for some misdemeanour by making her scrub the floor, and Frieda obeyed, weeping and whining and thoroughly enjoying herself. Lawrence hit Frieda. She hit him.

It all went on noisily and publicly on that stage peopled by the acolytes, hopeful future lovers, invited visitors, the uninvited; and yet a young disciple reported that this man who was in the newspapers as some kind of monster for his writing was the most charming host, a wonderful talker - he enthralled his listeners - and a fine cook. He was good to children, who liked him. The frequent unpleasantness of their emotional life was clearly not what the two thought important, or central. They shared something deep that transcended the sadomasochistic games, the quarrels. Lawrence told Frieda that she was and always had been the central experience of his life and that he would have been nothing without her. When somebody sympathised with Frieda after Lawrence's death because of what he saw as an ugly marriage, Frieda told him that he knew nothing about it: Lawrence had been wonderful, and together they had enjoyed an experience that was beyond most people. It was not only the embattled marital relations that often shocked witnesses; it was reported that Lawrence was sometimes cruel to animals.

He beat a little bitch for being on heat, and he hanged a hen upside down "to cool her off down there" when she was broody. There he was, impotent, while preaching about the importance of sex; here they were obdurately female, as if the Bacchae had assumed the shape of domestic animals, and he had to punish them. So, he was capable of lapses into craziness, but the trouble was, he had always to be in the right, even though so contradictory. This man, who was capable of hurting animals, wrote wonderful poems about them, unforgettable stories. Which brings us to the tales that have infuriated feminists. "The Fox" is one, but I can't see it. More and more do I feel the bleak cold threadbare dismalness of England after the war, struck by the great flu epidemic, short of food and warmth. And who is that red fox flickering through the grass, his knowing eyes on the two young women and their struggle for survival?

"St Mawr" is described as woman-hating, that magical tale about the horse, but what surely is strongest in it is the rage of complaints about men, who are not male enough, not men at all, for this is Lawrence's perennial discontent, that men have become effeminate. St Mawr, the horse, is male and marvellous, but no real horse was ever such a creature of myth and the demonic, this fiery glowing stallion which - if we do have to diminish the power of the thing - is probably an emanation of Lawrence's wish-thinking, poor Lawrence, so ill, so weakened. St Mawr is all male, and the women in the tale compare him to modern males, who they say are so tame and so feeble. From the start of Lawrence's work, to its end, we find men described as inadequate, weak, without balls, unmale, feeble, and women are always looking for "real" men.

In Women in Love, in "St Mawr", in stories like "The Captain's Doll", men are mocked, derided, women ride away in search of "real" men, look for gamekeepers, gypsies, Indians, all the time cruelly jeering. Lawrence is described as a misogynist. This is surely one of the great ironies. What we do have from him is a report on the sex war of his time, and no one has done it better. His men and women are usually at odds, or in strange spiritual conjunctions, as in "The Ladybird". "Men and women do not like each other" - the theme comes up again in Lady Chatterley's Lover. No one ever wrote better about the power struggles of sex and love. What a paradox. Lawrence often wrote nonsense about the mechanics of sex but is full of insights about men and women. "We are among the ruins," says Lawrence, opening the tale which is supposed to be all about sex, and announcing what I think is the major theme of the novel, usually overlooked. It is permeated with the first world war, the horror of it.

And against the horrors, the rotting bodies, the senseless slaughter of the trenches, the postwar poverty and bleakness - against the cataclysm, "the fallen skies", Lawrence proposes to put in the scales love, tender sex, the tender bodies of people in love; England would be saved by warm-hearted fucking. Now, looking back from our perspective of over 60 years after that second terrible war, we see Mellors, who was a soldier in India in the first world war, and Constance Chatterley with her war-crippled husband, clinging on to each other, and just ahead the next war that would involve the whole world. It is not that, once having seen how war overshadows this tale, threatens these lovers, the love story loses its poignancy, but for me it is no longer the central theme, despite what Lawrence intended. Now I think this is one of the most powerful anti-war novels ever written. How was it I had not seen that, when I first read it? But I had. I remember reading it and thinking - Yes, that's my father (and it was my mother too, but I was years off seeing that).

I was a young woman, and here was this novel with all its scandalous fame at last in my hands. It had come across the U-boat haunted sea, from the London bookshops. The expurgated edition, of course. I was soon besotted with the lovers, in their little hut, with scenes like Connie crouching to hold the baby pheasants on her palm, while Mellors bends over her to help; her tears; the wonderful scenes of spring beginning in the woods where she walks; the invocations to tenderness; the great theme of two against the world. Rereading this novel many years and some loves later, the great sex scenes have lost their power. We have had a sexual revolution, and a great deal of information. Some of the lyrical passages still thrill young women. In parts of the world where women are not free, may be stoned to death or publicly hanged for adultery, this novel is being read as Lawrence wanted it read, as a manifesto for sex, for love. Some of his scenes are on the edge of the ridiculous, but surely we have to salute him for his courage.

Lovers do behave absurdly, in love talk and in intimacies they might not want outsiders to guess at, but Lawrence is not shy about making his lovers run about in the rain, the woman dancing - it was the fashion then, Isadora Duncan was responsible - or twining flowers in each other's pubic hair. It is precisely his courage that sometimes brings him to the edge of farce. A more canny, and a lesser, novelist would have excised these passages that were bound to invite mockery. But throughout all his work, the wonderful can be side by side with the absurd. Lawrence, the miner's son, had a great deal to say about the class war. His verses about the upper classes, the middle classes, are among the silliest ever written. Hard to believe that the same man wrote some of the most beautiful poems in the language. "Snake", "Bavarian Gentians", "Not I, ... but the wind", the lovely poem "The Piano", about the grown man remembering his mother playing to him as a child. The Lawrence who wrote "The Ship of Death" was surely never introduced to the man who wrote about the beastly bourgeois.

He married a German aristocrat, and wrote a novel about a Lady Chatterley who was married to a baronet. Among his friends were aristocrats. When some scribbler snipes at the people living in fashionable areas of London he will probably be living there himself as soon as he can afford it. Lawrence may have chosen to live far from his origins, but he never wrote better than about the unforgettable daughter of the mining community, Ivy Bolton, who is as solidly inside the values of her class, though she aspires to the refinements of the upper classes, as Clifford Chatterley is inside his, believing that "there is an absolute gulf between the ruling and the serving classes". Ivy Bolton's husband was killed in a mining accident, and she says, "No, I'll abide by my own. I've not much respect for people." A sentiment expressed by many of the people in this book, in their times and seasons. Which brings us to Clifford's cronies, who come to visit and who sit around exchanging their disillusioned views. They are all officers from the trenches, and the skies have very thoroughly fallen for them, and they see themselves as bound to set things right, or at least to define them.

They believe in the life of the mind, and Constance sits and listens, her heart cold within her because of the deadly negativity of it all. She asks Tommy Dukes why men and women don't like each other very much these days. Brigadier Tommy Dukes is here to illustrate Lawrence's perennial thesis, that Englishmen lack virility, lack balls, are generally weak and unmanly. Though there is nothing unmasculine about Tommy Dukes. He is quite happy, thank you, going his own way, without sex. Constance asks, wistfully enough, if he would not want to make love with her, but no, Tommy Dukes says he likes her but he would not want to make love. Whereas Mellors says that he could die for a bit of good cunt. Constance is present throughout this novel as a real woman, with a proper arse on her, and a woman's legs, not one of these modern girls with "Small boy buttocks like two collar-studs" and without any real femininity. How I did respond to this, as a young woman, to Mellors who loved Constance Chatterley for being womanly.

During the 1960s feminist revolution I was surprised and amused to hear some very vocal feminists say that they had read Lady Chatterley as I had, a generation or two before. One has to accept the fact that most women still yearn for the real, the perfect, the whole lover, their lost twin halves (Plato - but Lawrence had no time for him), for Mr Right, and recent events have confirmed it. That witty book, Bridget Jones's Diary, unleashed dozens of novels by young women, all looking for Mr Right, and for a man who, like Mellors, "had the courage of his tenderness", though tenderness certainly was not on the agendas of the 1960s revolution. And none of these feminists, children of peace, noticed the deep anger against war and the results of war that I think is the emotional foundation of the novel. They could barely remember the second world war, their parents' show, and the first world war was still not being remembered as it is now, was still the Great Unmentionable, or a line or two in the history books.

In 1960 there was a court case about this novel, a noisy affair, a landmark in the story of English literature, since there was an attempt to have the unexpurgated version banned. Many literary notables stood up for it, and for the freedom of speech. An aspect of that trial has taken a long time to be seen. Among the famous love scenes there is one that was not noticed by judge or jury, by the prosecution or defence - not by anybody. In it Lawrence lauds the anal fuck as the apex of sexual experience, but it is written in such a way as not to be explicit. Well, it is known that a lot of people enjoy anal sex. In these days he would not have to write so obscurely. Apparently he is leaving behind tender-hearted fucking, and the vaginal orgasm, not to mention the poor old clitoris, for what is described is really an anal rape. Constance enjoys it and reaches her fulfilment as a woman - we have Lawrence's word for it. But it is so funny that no one in that court saw what Lawrence was actually saying in this novel, defended as being really so moral and so wholesome.

What has to strike us now is the angry polemics of the piece. And now, in this passage, we do reach the ridiculous, because of his blindness as to how its insistence must strike us, once we notice it. We do know that Lawrence's sexual problems were resolved in anal sex, and these days probably few people would say more than, "Really? Now that's interesting, seeing how he did go on about cunt." Here is this fierce moralistic writing, with all of Lawrence's power behind it. And what has tender-hearted sex got to do with anal rape? Why not say, simply, that Mellors and his Constance did enjoy a bit of buggery? But no, this novel is a manifesto, or perhaps several, because of the number of different selves who lived inside Lawrence's skin, and it was fused by the force of this dying, driven man's need to tell the world that he could save it. I once owned a farm cottage on the edge of Dartmoor and I often drove up and down from London, giving lifts, as in those days we thought nothing of it.

Once, coming up from Devon, I stopped near Salisbury Plain, where they train soldiers, to give a lift to a very young soldier who I at once saw was in an unusual state of mind. He was flushed, smiling, could not stop talking, sometimes exploding in a young laugh, surprising himself and me. He was in love. Scarcely conscious of me, the middle-aged woman driving him up to London and his true love, he had to talk, had to tell someone ... he wished he could tell me how he felt, he didn't have the words, but did I know this book here? And he brought out a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover. A friend had given it to him, saying it was all about love, and yes, he was right, this friend, he had never read anything like it, well, he wasn't really a reader, actually this was the only book he had ever read. But he had read it several times, and kept finding new things in it. Had I read it? he wanted to know, and if not I must look out for a copy. Then I would understand what he was feeling now ...

and there he sat, all the way to London, Lady Chatterley's Lover in his hand, smiling, laughing, given over to joy. Surely this youth, who was soon going to be married, was Lawrence's ideal reader for whom he wrote his testament novel three times. This happened a long time ago, the ecstatic young soldier would be in his sixties now, Lawrence has been dead for over 70 years, and Lady Chatterley's Lover is still at large in the world, still potent and persuasive, and in the hands of young women in countries where they know they may be killed for love. · This is an edited extract from Doris Lessing's introduction to the new Penguin Classic edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover Lady Chatterley's Lover: Lawrence's 3 Versions | Emanuel Levy Lady Chatterley's Lover: Lawrence's 3 Versions June 7, 2007 by EmanuelLevy Leave a Comment D.H. Lawrence wrote three versions of “Lady Chatterley's Lover.” The novel known by this title is the third version, the one Lawrence considered definitive and which he published at his own expense in March 1928, a few months before his death.

The fact that these three versions exist is not in itself remarkable; it is Lawrence's method of writing them that is extraordinary in the history of literature. His method was as follows: between each version, Lawrence would put the manuscript aside for several months and go on to something else. When he came back to his project, he didn't work from the previous manuscript to modify it, but entirely rewrote a second version. And later, he rewrote the third version as well. Therefore, certain plot points and circumstances are common to all three versions, but entire passages are not strictly similar and no dialogue is identical. The characters themselves, the novel's four main characters–Lady Chatterley and her husband Clifford, the gamekeeper (whose name changes depending on the version) and Mrs. Bolton, Clifford's nurse–vary significantly from one version to another. As a result, we are dealing with three independent versions, each one coherent from the first page to the last. The director discovered “Lady Chatterley's Lover” fairly late. He says: “Certain aspects of the book excited me, but in my view, it was impossible book to adapt, unless it were an adaptation so free that I wouldn't have dared to think of it.

It must be said that “Lady Chatterley's Lover” (the third version) is pretty verbose, and in that respect, the book has aged badly. It's as though Lawrence, in view of his subject's eminently subversive nature and the censorship that he was anticipating, felt obliged to theorize the novel's thesis through his characters' voices: love is stronger than all class barriers.” “Then I learned that there were two previous versions and that the second had been published by Gallimard under the title “Lady Chatterley et l'homme des bois” (published in English as “John Thomas and Lady Jane”). This version is simpler, more direct in dealing with its subject, less tortured. The book is more focused on the relationship between Constance and Parkin, the gamekeeper, and the two characters themselves are quite different. For example, here Parkin is a simple man who logically should have been a miner, but who chose to be a gamekeeper in order to escape life in society.” “In “Lady Chatterley's Lover,” he is an ex-officer in the British Indian Army who has chosen to live as a hermit.

His culture and origins make his relationship with Lady Chatterley less scandalous, however. In a way, intellectually, they are practically from the same world, which explains how they can discuss together what is happening to them.” In “Lady Chatterley et l'homme des bois,” they don't discuss things, they experience them. Lastly, even more than in the final version, the story is literally overrun by vegetation. And the plant kingdom doesn't come in simply as a metaphor for the life force that brings the two protagonists together, but accompanies them constantly during their transformation. To me, that's the most beautiful thing about “Lady Chatterley et l'homme des bois,” the story of a love that is one with the material experience of transformation. Share this: Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence | PenguinRandomHouse.com Add to Cart About Lady Chatterley’s Lover One of the most extraordinary literary works of the twentieth century, Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned in England and the United States after its initial publication in 1928. The unexpurgated edition did not appear in America until 1959, after one of the most spectacular legal battles in publishing history.

With her soft brown hair, lithe figure and big, wondering eyes, Constance Chatterley is possessed of a certain vitality. Yet she is deeply unhappy; married to an invalid, she is almost as inwardly paralyzed as her husband Clifford is paralyzed below the waist. It is not until she finds refuge in the arms of Mellors the game-keeper, a solitary man of a class apart, that she feels regenerated. Together they move from an outer world of chaos towards an inner world of fulfillment. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. About Lady Chatterley’s Lover One of the most extraordinary literary works of the twentieth century, Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned in England and the United States after its initial publication in 1928.

The unexpurgated edition did not appear in America until 1959, after one of the most spectacular legal battles in publishing history. With her soft brown hair, lithe figure and big, wondering eyes, Constance Chatterley is possessed of a certain vitality. Yet she is deeply unhappy; married to an invalid, she is almost as inwardly paralyzed as her husband Clifford is paralyzed below the waist. It is not until she finds refuge in the arms of Mellors the game-keeper, a solitary man of a class apart, that she feels regenerated. Together they move from an outer world of chaos towards an inner world of fulfillment. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. About Lady Chatterley’s Lover An authoritative edition of what D.H.

Lawrence called “the most improper novel in the world” With her soft brown hair, lithe figure and big, wondering eyes, Constance Chatterley is possessed of a certain vitality. Yet she is deeply unhappy; married to an invalid, she is almost as inwardly paralysed as her husband Clifford is paralysed below the waist. It is not until she finds refuge in the arms of Mellors the game-keeper, a solitary man of a class apart, that she feels regenerated. Together they move from an outer world of chaos towards an inner world of fulfillment. Included here, in his essay A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, are Lawrence’s own, final thoughts on male-female relationships in the modern world. This Penguin edition reproduces the newly established Cambridge text, the first edition ever to restore to Lawrence’s most famous work the words he wrote and the first to correct authoritatively the 1928 Florence edition which Lawrence personally supervised. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines.

Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. About Lady Chatterley’s Lover Part of Penguin’s beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. Constance Chatterley feels trapped in her sexless marriage to the invalid Sir Clifford. Unable to fulfil his wife emotionally or physically, Clifford encourages her to have a liaison with a man of their own class. But Connie is attracted instead to her husband’s gamekeeper and embarks on a passionate affair that brings new life to her stifled existence. Can she find a true equality with Mellors, despite the vast gulf between their positions in society? One of the most controversial novels in English literature, Lady Chatterley’s Lover is an erotically charged and psychologically powerful depiction of adult relationships. Get the news you want from Penguin Random House About D. H.

Lawrence The son of a miner, the prolific novelist, poet, and travel writer David Herbert Lawrence was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, in 1885. He attended Nottingham University and found employment as a schoolteacher. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published… More about D. H. Lawrence About D. H. Lawrence The son of a miner, the prolific novelist, poet, and travel writer David Herbert Lawrence was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, in 1885. He attended Nottingham University and found employment as a schoolteacher. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published… More about D. H. Lawrence About D. H. Lawrence The son of a miner, the prolific novelist, poet, and travel writer David Herbert Lawrence was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, in 1885. He attended Nottingham University and found employment as a schoolteacher. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published… More about D. H. Lawrence About D. H. Lawrence The son of a miner, the prolific novelist, poet, and travel writer David Herbert Lawrence was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, in 1885.

He attended Nottingham University and found employment as a schoolteacher. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published… More about D. H. Lawrence Product Details Lady Chatterley's Lover (TV Movie 2015) - IMDb IMDb There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error In 1913 Connie Reid marries wealthy Nottingham colliery owner Sir Clifford Chatterley but he returns from the Great War disabled and in a wheelchair. Connie is loyal but begins to feel ...

See full summary » Director: Take the quiz Related News a list of 21 titles created 28 Jul 2014 a list of 48 titles created 17 Aug 2015 a list of 22 titles created 12 Jan 2016 a list of 26 titles created 6 months ago a list of 49 titles created 4 weeks ago Title: Lady Chatterley's Lover (TV Movie 2015) 6.3/10 Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. The Go-Between (TV Movie 2015) Drama An elderly man pieces together his childhood memories after finding his diary from 1900, which he wrote when he was 13 years old. Director: Pete Travis An eighteenth century drama details the scandalous life of Lady Seymour Worsley. Director: Sheree Folkson Life in Squares (TV Mini-Series 2015) Drama An intimate and emotional drama for BBC Two about the revolutionary Bloomsbury group.

Stars: Eve Best, Ed Birch, Phoebe Fox A romantic drama set in Germany just before WWI and centered on a married woman who falls in love with her husband's protégé. Separated first by duties and then by the war, they pledge their devotion to one another. Director: Patrice Leconte Cider with Rosie (TV Movie 2015) Drama A semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story set in the Cotswolds during and immediately after the First World War. Director: Philippa Lowthorpe Lady Chatterley (TV Mini-Series 1993) Drama | Romance Lady Constance Chatterley is married to the handicapped Sir Clifford Chatterley, who was wounded in the First World War. When they move to his family's estate, Constance (Connie) meets ... See full summary » Stars: Joely Richardson, Sean Bean, James Wilby War & Peace (TV Mini-Series 2016) Drama | History | Romance As the Russian conflict with Napoleon reaches its peak, five aristocratic families face the possibility of their lives being changed forever.

Stars: Paul Dano, James Norton, Lily James Edit Storyline In 1913 Connie Reid marries wealthy Nottingham colliery owner Sir Clifford Chatterley but he returns from the Great War disabled and in a wheelchair. Connie is loyal but begins to feel alienated as he engages a nurse, Mrs Bolton, to bathe him and excludes her from pit business. Despite his desire for an heir his impotency results in a lack of sexual activity and Connie is drawn to handsome Oliver Mellors, the plain-spoken former miner her husband has engaged as his game-keeper and who represents the passion she craves. They embark upon a physical affair in Oliver's cottage but are discovered and betrayed by Mrs Bolton. Connie, now carrying Oliver's child, must choose between a pampered but joyless existence with her husband or an uncertain future with the man she has come to love. Written by don @ minifie-1 6 September 2015 (UK) See more » Also Known As: Lady Chatterleys älskare See more » Filming Locations: Did You Know?

Trivia Richard Madden who plays Oliver Mellers in this adaptation played Robb Stark, son of Eddard "Ned" Stark in Game of Thrones. Ned Stark was played by Sean Bean who played Oliver Mellers in Lady Chatterley back in 1993. See more » Quotes Chaste Version of the Lawrence Classic Emphasizing Class Conflict 28 September 2015 | by l_rawjalaurence (London) – See all my reviews Compared to earlier versions of the Lawrence novel on film and television - for example, Ken Russell's 1993 television version or Sylvia Kristel's porno-fest (1981) directed by her then-husband Just Jaeckin, Jed Mercurio's telefilm is relatively chaste in terms of sexual content. We see Mellors (Richard Madden) and Connie (Holliday Grainger) making love, but it is tastefully filmed by the fire in Mellors' shack, using lighting strongly reminiscent of Russell's WOMEN IN LOVE (1969). Director Mercurio seems far more interested in exploring the consequences of class-difference in a highly stratified society.

Clifford Chatterley (James Norton) views his mine-workers and servants as sub-humans, whose sole function consists of serving the rich. In one sequence he sits in his motor-cycle and sidecar and lets Mellors push him out of a rut, even though this proves injurious to Mellors' health. He treats Ivy Bolton (Jodie Comer) with equal disdain - that is, until the climactic moment when Bolton confronts her master with the news of Lady Chatterley's affair. The contrast between rich and poor could not be more stark. The film opens with a mining accident in which Ivy's husband Ted (Chris Morrison) is crushed to death by an underground fall of coal. Left with little or nothing to survive on, Ivy can only eke out an existence serving the rich. By contrast Clifford lives a life of comfortable gentility, indulging in frequent parties whose guests dance to Scott Joplin rag-times played by a servile band. It is these class-differences that inspire Mellors' resentment.

The reason for his feelings is clearly explained towards the end; suffice to say that he believes that the landed gentry have little or no conception of what it is to live on the bread-line, at the beck and call of the upper classes. We might be persuaded to see his affair with Lady Chatterley as a means for him to take revenge on all the social slights he has experienced throughout his life. Yet Grainger's performance proves that this is clearly not the case. As Lady Chatterley she spends much of her time caring for her husband, even though it is a thankless task. Frustrated by her husband's impotence, she looks for love and compassion; and finds both in Mellors. She resembles a ship without a rudder; constrained by the conventions of a restrictive upper class, she longs to express herself both emotionally and sexually. Grainger proves extremely good at suggesting this frustration through small facial gestures puncturing her veneer of social respectability. To be honest, this version of LADY CHATTERLEY does not make any attempt to explore sexual feelings in any great depth, as in Lawrence's source-text.

Director Mercurio sees the story as a tussle between duty and emotion, which reaches a climax at the end when the three protagonists at last confront one another. This is a thoroughly satisfying production of the Lawrence classic, marred only by some syrupy music (by Csrly Paradis) that sometimes directs our attention away from the characters' emotions. 10 of 13 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes Lady Chatterley (TV Mini-Series 1993) - IMDb Lady Chatterley Lady Constance Chatterley is married to the handicapped Sir Clifford Chatterley, who was wounded in the First World War. When they move to his family's estate, Constance (Connie) meets ...

See full summary » Stars: From $3.99 (SD) on Amazon Video ON DISC a list of 35 titles created 15 May 2012 a list of 33 titles created 07 Feb 2014 a list of 41 titles created 15 Feb 2015 a list of 21 titles created 10 months ago a list of 22 titles created 1 month ago Search for " Lady Chatterley " on Amazon.com Connect with IMDb Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. A French adaptation of the second (and much less well-known) version of D.H. Lawrence's erotic tale. Director: Pascale Ferran A virtuous young woman is oppressed by her ambitious family and a rake who's becomes obsessed with her. Stars: Sean Bean, Saskia Wickham, Jonny Phillips Lady Chatterley's Lover (TV Movie 2015) Drama | Romance In 1913 Connie Reid marries wealthy Nottingham colliery owner Sir Clifford Chatterley but he returns from the Great War disabled and in a wheelchair.

Connie is loyal but begins to feel ... See full summary » Director: Jed Mercurio A film adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's novel. After a crippling injury leaves her husband impotent, Lady Chatterly is torn between her love for her husband and her physical desires. With her ... See full summary » Director: Just Jaeckin The Fifteen Streets (TV Movie 1989) Drama | History | Romance In northern England around 1900, the worker John O'Brien lives near poverty in a small house in the worker's district. He falls in love with Mary, the teacher of his highly intelligent ... See full summary » Director: David Wheatley Fanny Hill (TV Mini-Series 2007) Drama | Romance Orphaned by smallpox, young Lancashire country lady Fanny Hill cheerfully accepts her friend Esther Davies's offer to join the London 'working girls' with Mrs. Brown, a madam who recruits ... See full summary » Stars: Rebecca Night, Alison Steadman, Hugo Speer Early version of D.H. Lawrence's classic risquÃ© novel about an aristocratic wife who has a passionate affair with her game keeper. French, dubbed in English.

(1959; B&W) Director: Marc Allégret A Woman of Substance charts the life of Emma Harte, from kitchen maid at the beginning of the 20th Century, to respected business woman and Grandmother in the 1980's. From humble beginnings... See full summary » Stars: Jenny Seagrove, Barry Bostwick, Deborah Kerr Hold the Dream (TV Movie 1986) Drama | Romance Two-part, four-hour followup to "A Woman of Substance" with Deborah Kerr, now playing Emma Harte at age 80 in the last winter of her life and dealing with her granddaughter Paula, as well ... See full summary » Director: Don Sharp The Glass Virgin (TV Mini-Series 1995) Drama | Romance Set in 1870s England, the story tells of Annabella Lagrange and the terrible secret her wealthy parents have kept from her. When she finally learns the truth, she runs away and eventually ...

See full summary » Stars: Jan Graveson, Christine Kavanagh, Brendan Coyle Lorna Doone (TV Movie 2000) Drama | Romance Against a backdrop of political and religious upheaval, a farmer falls in love with the "queen" of the notorious Doone clan --a family that he has sworn vengeance on. Director: Mike Barker Sharpe's Mission (TV Movie 1996) Action | Adventure | History 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 8/10 X Sharpe is teamed with a Colonel he helped promote and they are tasked to destroy a powder magazine, but an alliance with the French may threaten their success. Meanwhile, Jane is wearying of the army life and Harper and Ramona are at odds. Director: Tom Clegg Edit Storyline Lady Constance Chatterley is married to the handicapped Sir Clifford Chatterley, who was wounded in the First World War. When they move to his family's estate, Constance (Connie) meets their tough-yet-quiet groundskeeper, Oliver Mellors.

Soon, she discovers that the source of her unhappiness is from not being fulfilled in love, and in turning to the arms of Mellors, she has a sexual awakening that will change her thoughts forever. Written by Anonymous 6 June 1993 (UK) See more » Also Known As: Lady Chatterley szeretője See more » Filming Locations: Did You Know? Trivia The original score was removed from the DVD release because of copyright issues. As a result, non-copyrighted material was used, and often repeated several times throughout the film. See more » Quotes (California, USA) – See all my reviews This movie was very enjoyable as well as instructive. It was enjoyable because it was so faithful to the most popular version of the story and instructive about how people conducted their lives after WW1 in England. Joely Richardson is a new actress for me and I find her convincing as Connie. Sean Bean is a familiar handsome actor who has a long career I've followed. I feel these actors portrayed Mellors and Connie as reluctant lovers. They were strangers at first and only knew they needed what everyone needs, tenderness in their lives.

It felt like I was watching two people desperate in their search, almost helplessly drawn to find happiness against all odds. I personally don't care if Sean Bean did not appear completely naked, and if the lovemaking was wooden at first, it felt right given the circumstances. These actors are bringing characters to life for us and it should not be forgotten this is not a view into an affair between the actors, it is the portrayal of characters brought to life by good acting and believable direction. 25 of 26 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes Censorship in Australia - The Case of Lady Chatterley's Lover | Self-Publishing at GRIN Censorship in Australia - The Case of Lady Chatterley's Lover Essay, 2011, 14 Pages eBook (PDF, ePUB and MOBI) for only US$ 11.99 Download immediately without shipping costs. Readable on tablets and phones. Book for only US$ 20.50 Shipping worldwide Excerpt D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover has courted controversy ever since it was first published in Paris in 1928.

Banned from the outset in Australia, its ultimate release proved to be a seminal moment in the country’s secretive censorship regime. Detailing the affair between a frustrated aristocratic housewife and her invalid husband’s gamekeeper, few novels have elicited such scandal upon polite society. Reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover nowadays, the modern reader may find it hard to see what all the fuss was about. Yet, while this subject matter may seem relatively inoffensive by today’s standards, Lady Chatterley’s Lover must be considered within the context of the puritanical Australia of the 1920s-1960s. At this time, Australia had the strictest censorship of any democratic nation. Publications of all kinds were kept under surveillance, and thousands of works were banned as seditious, blasphemous or obscene. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which ironically enough D.H. Lawrence intentionally wrote to confront the censors, was banned in its original form and instead released in seven different expurgated versions (Moore, 2012: 108).

In this essay I will chart the history of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in Australia , from its initial banning to its final release, in light of the environment of censorship. Lady Chatterley’s Lover fell prey to censorship in both the United Kingdom and Australia. Following the novel’s initial publication in Paris, it was sanctimoniously banned in Britain (Lee, 2011a: 28). Australian censors were quick to respond to the uproar and the Customs service was duly alerted to watch out for it on importation. Resultantly, it came as no surprise when Lady Chatterley’s Lover was intercepted in September 1929. In a ploy to elude censors, the novel was disguised as part of a parcel addressed to a W.A. Webb, South Australian Commissioner for Railways (Lee, 2011a: 28). It transpired that Webb had been sent the package from a Chicago bookseller with whom he had a regular arrangement. Their risk went unrewarded when the novel was declared a prohibited import upon discovery (Lee, 2011a: 30).

When Webb, requested his copy back in order to return it to the bookseller, Customs refused. Rather, he was instructed not to become involved with ‘books of that nature’ in the future (Lee, 2011: 30). Not only did importers risk having such works seized at Customs, but to publish them within Australia was punishable under state obscenity laws. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was part of a rush of bannings between 1929 and 1930 of ‘modern’ novels by established authors with strong claims to literary merit, who deliberately pushed the boundaries of the representation of sex (Moore, 2012: 108). In seizing Lady Chatterley’s Lover and other scandal prone titles, the Customs Service acted in the belief of protecting everyday Australians from moral contamination (Lee, 2011: 30). Little did they know that this was to be their first sighting of what was to become the world’s most famous banned book (Moore, 2012: 108). Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned upon import to Australia on the precedent that it was labelled obscene.

Customs Regulations prevented the importation of any publications that were seen to fall foul of certain criteria, namely those of obscenity, blasphemy and sedition (Coleman, 1962: 30). Of these three measures, works of an obscene nature were considered particularly offensive. This was due to the fear that obscenity had the power to threaten the very moral fibre of society (Lee, 2011a: 31). So prevalent was this concern that the war against obscenity extended far beyond the reach of Customs. Literary censorship functioned on both State and Commonwealth levels (Griffith, 2001: 7). Just as the importation of books was regulated federally under the customs scheme, so the censorship regimes in place under State legislation governed all locally produced publications (Griffith, 2001: 7). While Customs banned books on importation, at state level the police force kept abreast of local publications and raided bookshops that were suspected of holding obscene works (Lee, 2011b: 112).

In fact, all that was needed was a single complaint for authors to find themselves on trail for obscenity (Lee, 2011b: 108). Yet the concept of obscenity is arguably entirely subjective and as a result difficult to define. According to the censoring authorities of the time, an obscene work was one that had the apparent power to corrupt readers’ morals and supposedly lead them astray (Lee, 2011b: 108). This sentiment was supported by 1946 Comptroller-General of Customs J.J. Kennedy: ‘The Department has a definite duty to protect the morals of the community by exercising censorship ...There is an insidious campaign to glorify promiscuity and make light of sexual offences. This must react unfavourably on immature minds and does, I fear, create desires which lead to unnatural offences’ (Moore, 2010). Considering that obscenity is defined by the moral standards of the time, it is no surprise that Lady Chatterley’s Lover fell foul of censors. Not only did the novel depict numerous scenes of a sexual nature, but it also centred on an adulterous relationship.

While this was contentious enough in itself, the affair between the aristocratic Constance Chatterley and a lowly gamekeeper acted as a commentary on the archaic class system. In order to comprehend the furore surrounding Lady Chatterley’s Lover in Australia, the novel must be considered within the confines of the moral standards of the time. The main area of contention appeared to be that the novel’s heroine, Constance Chatterley, embarked upon a passionate affair with a man who was not of her class. What was once so shocking, no longer resonates in a modern society that has been shaped by feminism, the dissolving of class barriers and the sexual revolution. Yet, so fearful were the authorities of the persuasive powers of Lawrence’s novel that they promptly labelled it obscene and kept the ban in place until 1965. In The Censor’s Library, Nicole Moore (2012: 104) explains that modern literature had been experimenting with challenging versions of sex and gender for some time by the early 1930s.

She argues that the rejection of such modern culture was a defining feature of the interwar period in Australia, where highbrow modernism was rejected as a threatening foreign impulse (Moore, 2012: 105). As a result Customs were suitably horrified by the explicit representations of sex as an essential part of the “full representation of subjectivity, or character and experience”, evidenced in novels such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Moore, 2012: 108). Additionally, it was the potent combination of sex and social class that proved to be so threatening and subsequently lead to D.H. Lawrence being considered to be the ‘most hounded British author of the 20th century’ (Travis). Such was the level of hysteria surrounding the novel in Australia, that Minster for Customs from 1956-1964, Denham Henty, explained on national television that 'normal healthy Australians would not be interested in the works of D.H. Lawrence...anyway' (Bacon, 2011:202).

[...] Excerpt out of 14 pages - scroll top eBook (PDF, ePUB and MOBI) for only US$ 11.99 Download immediately without shipping costs. Readable on tablets and phones. Book for only US$ 20.50 Shipping worldwide

Question: In literature, what was Lady Chatterley's first name ?
Answer: CONSTANCE