1928
Without the intervention of the lawyers, D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover might never have been anything more than one of the lesser-known works of a great novelist. It was finished in 1926, only four years before Lawrence died, and he spent the next two years trying to arrange publication. In the end it was privately printed, first in Florence, and then in Paris, but remained banned in both Britain and the United States for more than 30 years. Its explicit sexual content and four-letter words meant that potential publishers were scared off by the threat of prosecution under obscenity laws. Court cases, first in the United States and then in Britain, eventually allowed it to be published in 1959 and 1960 respectively, overturning not just the ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but the whole principle of book censorship.
The novel tells the story of Constance Chatterley, the wife of a landowner, Sir Clifford Chatterley, who is confined to a wheelchair, paralyzed and sexually impotent, as a result of injuries sustained during the First World War. When a young writer named Michaelis visits them at their home at Wragby Hall in the English Midlands, she takes him as her lover for a brief and unsatisfactory period, but then embarks on a passionate and highly sexually charged affair with her husband’s gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors.
Mellors is the son of a miner, and speaks with a broad Derbyshire accent, but a spell as an officer in the Indian Army has left him able to adopt the manners, language and accent of a gentleman when he chooses.
Connie becomes pregnant by him, and then, when his estranged wife Bertha is threatening to cause a scandal, she confesses everything to Sir Clifford. Members of both her family and his, who had been prepared to countenance a discreet affair with a member of her own social class, are shocked and outraged that she should have given herself to a working man. The novel ends with Connie and Mellors temporarily apart as they hope for their divorces and the promise of a new life together.
In this extract, Connie and Mellors have begun their affair. The gamekeeper often stresses the gulf between himself and his lover by speaking with a broad Derbyshire accent and syntax – ‘Shall us go i’ th’ ’ut?’ – but here, bitter because he suspects he has been used, he slips into standard English.
He looked at her, then again with the peculiar subtle grin out of the window. There was a tense silence.
At last he turned his head and said satirically:
‘That was why you wanted me, then, to get a child?’
She hung her head.
‘No. Not really,’ she said.
‘What then, REALLY?’ he asked rather bitingly.
She looked up at him reproachfully, saying: ‘I don’t know.’
He broke into a laugh.
‘Then I’m damned if I do,’ he said.
There was a long pause of silence, a cold silence.
‘Well,’ he said at last. ‘It’s as your Ladyship likes. If you get the baby, Sir Clifford’s welcome to it. I shan’t have lost anything. On the contrary, I’ve had a very nice experience, very nice indeed!’ – and he stretched in a half-suppressed sort of yawn.
‘If you’ve made use of me,’ he said, ‘it’s not the first time I’ve been made use of; and I don’t suppose it’s ever been as pleasant as this time; though of course one can’t feel tremendously dignified about it.’ – He stretched again, curiously, his muscles quivering, and his jaw oddly set.
‘But I didn’t make use of you,’ she said, pleading.
‘At your Ladyship’s service,’ he replied.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I liked your body.’
‘Did you?’ he replied, and he laughed. ‘Well, then, we’re quits, because I liked yours.’
He looked at her with queer darkened eyes.
‘Would you like to go upstairs now?’ he asked her, in a strangled sort of voice.
LADY CHATTERLEY S LOVER, CHAPTER 12, 1928
Lady Chatterley’s Lover is as much about class as it is about sex, although it was the detailed and intimate descriptions of sexual activity – together with Lawrence’s liberal use of four-letter words, which at that time were almost never seen in print – that led to the book being banned around the world. Reviewers who had seen it savaged it – one wrote that it ‘reeked with obscenity and lewdness’ – and those who had not read it were even more extreme in their condemnation.
Lawrence continued to defend his work, which he insisted was ‘an honest, healthy book, necessary for us today’, and even rewrote it twice in an unsuccessful effort to persuade publishers to take it. When that failed, he had it printed privately in Florence in 1928, and circulated 1000 copies through his close personal friends. A second edition, which he had printed in Paris the following year with an essay explaining the thinking behind the book, sold out within three months; pirated copies and expurgated versions also sold briskly.
But it was not until 1959 that the US courts overturned the American ban on the book. Emboldened by this decision, Penguin Books challenged the British courts in 1960 by publishing it. The landmark trial that followed was one of the last gasps of longstanding literary censorship in Britain. The old-fashioned and patronizing sexism and class prejudice implicit in the famous question posed by the prosecuting counsel to the jury – ‘Is this a book which you would wish your wife or servants to read?’ – were ridiculed even then, and the prosecution failed.
The successful defences mounted by supporters of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in both the United States and Britain did not mark the end of obscenity prosecutions of books in either country – but they were the start of a new and more liberal age, and marked as such by the British poet Philip Larkin (1922–85) in his poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’, in which he asserts that sexual intercourse began ‘Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP’.
Some countries embraced the new attitudes; others rejected them for either religious or ethical reasons – India’s Supreme Court upheld a conviction of Lady Chatterley’s Lover for obscenity in 1966. However, there was a burgeoning mood of freedom of expression and permissiveness in lifestyle in many parts of the West, and in part that was the legacy of Lawrence, Connie Chatterley and Oliver Mellors.
The cultural importance of Lady Chatterley’s Lover derives, ultimately, from its status as a cause célèbre. Few people claim that it is one of D.H. Lawrence’s best books. He published a dozen other novels, including the more greatly admired Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow and Women in Love, along with ten collections of short stories, several books of poetry, and a number of plays, non-fiction works, translations and travel books based on his wanderings in Australia, Italy, Sri Lanka, North America, Mexico and France. But none of these books defined a cultural moment in the way that Lady Chatterley’s Lover did.