Riassunto
Riassunto di Lady Chatterley's Lover
A chi è rivolto
For readers who love novels of ideas, English social history, and stories where love and class collide. It also suits anyone curious about a book that went to court.
Che cos’è questo libro
Lady Chatterley's Lover is a novel by D. H. Lawrence, the last he finished. He wrote it in Italy in the late 1920s, when he was ill with the lung disease that would kill him in 1930. It was first printed privately in Florence in 1928. For decades it was banned or sold only in cut versions in Britain and the United States.
The story is set in the English Midlands after the First World War. Constance Chatterley, called Connie, is married to Sir Clifford Chatterley, a coal-owning baronet who came home from the war paralysed from the waist down. They live at Wragby Hall, beside a mining village and a stretch of old woodland. Connie is young, healthy and slowly starving for warmth. What she finds, and what it costs her, makes up the book.
Lawrence wanted to write about the body and the mind, and about what an industrial age does to both. He chose plain words for sex because he thought shame and silence were doing harm. The result is a love story, a portrait of a divided class system, and an argument about tenderness. In this summary you will meet the people of Wragby, follow Connie into the wood, and see why the book caused such trouble. We begin with the house itself, and with a marriage that has gone quiet.
In questo riassunto
- 1A marriage broken by the warFree
- 2Connie grows restless in a house of talk
- 3A hollow affair with Michaelis
- 4Mrs Bolton takes over Clifford
- 5The gamekeeper in the wood
- 6Touch, tenderness and a body awake
- 7Class and the machine age
- 8Mind against body, and a new kind of marriage
- 9How the book is told, and why it was banned
Punto chiave 1 di 9
A marriage broken by the war
The novel opens by saying that ours is an age of catastrophe, and that people must now get on with life anyway. That mood fits Connie Reid, who marries Clifford Chatterley in 1917, during the war. They have only a short honeymoon before he is sent to Flanders. He returns the next year badly wounded, and the doctors say he will never walk again.
Connie brings him home to Wragby Hall, the gloomy family house in the Midlands. The house sits near Tevershall, a colliery village of brick rows, slag heaps and smoke. Clifford has inherited the title because his older brother died in the war. The family estate, and its need of an heir, hang over the marriage from the start.
At first the couple hold together by talk and by duty. Connie nurses Clifford, wheels him about, and listens to his plans. He tells her that their bond of mind is enough, and that the physical side of marriage is a small thing. She tries to believe him, because he is brave and because she pities him.
But Lawrence shows the cost of that bargain slowly. Clifford is polite, clever and cold. He treats feeling as a weakness, and he treats Connie as a useful part of his life rather than a person he touches. Even his injury becomes a way of keeping her close and keeping her at a distance.
This first stretch of the book sets its central question. Can two people live well on talk, duty and good manners alone? Lawrence says no, and he builds the whole novel to show why.
That’s 1 of 9 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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Who’s who
- Constance Chatterley
- Called Connie, she is Clifford's young wife, longing for warmth and companionship in their emotionally distant marriage.
- Sir Clifford Chatterley
- Connie's husband is a wealthy baronet and mine owner, paralysed during the war and devoted to intellectual life.
- Oliver Mellors
- Clifford's private, guarded gamekeeper is a former army officer who lives apart from the household at Wragby.
- Mrs Bolton
- A skilled village nurse and widow, she cares for Clifford as Connie grows increasingly distant from him.
- Michaelis
- A successful Irish playwright visiting Clifford's circle, he is an outsider whose attentions offer Connie temporary companionship.
- Tommy Dukes
- An army officer and Clifford's friend, he questions the separation of intellectual life from bodily feeling.
- Hilda Reid
- Connie's protective older sister worries about her health and challenges the conditions of her marriage to Clifford.
About this edition
Every format is free to start, and print and large print are at cost.
- LengthAbout 121,000 words
- Reading timeAbout 8 h 5 min
- Listening time13 h 30 min
- FormatseBook, large-print eBook, audiobook, 15-minute summary; paperback, hardcover and large print at cost
- LanguagesEnglish and 14 other languages
Questions about Lady Chatterley's Lover
What is Lady Chatterley's Lover about?
It follows Connie Chatterley, whose husband was paralysed in the war, as she turns away from a cold marriage toward a gamekeeper on the estate. It also looks at class, industry and the need for tenderness.
Why was Lady Chatterley's Lover banned?
Lawrence used plain words for sex and described love scenes openly, and he showed a lady loving a working man. Authorities in Britain and the United States judged it obscene for decades. A British jury cleared it in 1960.
Who is Mellors in Lady Chatterley's Lover?
Oliver Mellors is the gamekeeper at Wragby. He rose to be an army officer, then chose a quiet life in the woods. He speaks both standard English and Derbyshire dialect.
When was Lady Chatterley's Lover written and is it a true story?
Lawrence wrote it in Italy in the late 1920s, and it was first printed privately in Florence in 1928. It is fiction, though it draws on his views of class, work and marriage in the Midlands.
Is Lady Chatterley's Lover hard to read?
The language is plain and the plot is simple.