Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Posted on June 20, 2021 by Val Hewson

By Thea John

Sheffield Hallam student Thea John writes about her reaction to D H Lawrence and Lady Chatterley’s Lover for her contribution to our Ideas into Action project with the university.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a book with a storied history. I first came across it as a mention of a play and mutterings of an obscenity trial while I was doing my GCSEs. At the time, my thoughts on banned books were rather teenage, but I found that I had read several stories I considered shocking already and did not need to read another.

The Daily Mail article on the result of the obscenity trial reads thus, ‘DON’T BE PRUDES, JUDGE SAYS’ with a picture of packets of the full copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that would then be sent to go out to booksellers. It is an interesting thing to consider this very English book was suppressed by the English for thirty years even when it was published in full in other countries.

The book is so very English, tied to a very English point of view, even though Wragby Hall (where much of the story takes place) is a fictional location. It talks about the pits, the town of Tevershall, London, Scotland, Sheffield – it’s a book that makes me feel English for having read it. These are places that I can connect with even after all these years.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover is more than just a story about an upper-class woman and her lower-class lover. Though it is that, it also served to me if no one else, as a window into history. I must admit I did not think all that highly of the book at the beginning. It was not a writing style I was accustomed to and it was not language I was accustomed to. It was a difficult read for me to the point that I had to find an audiobook to get used to it. But once you get past more archaic language and structure it is quite an insightful piece of literature.

It is quite worth it.

Themes that I found within included, capitalism, the class divide, nationalism, feminism, environmentalism, and of course sexuality. I devoted most of my research to be around the obscenity trial and I had forgotten Lawrence as a person except what I believe of him through this book – a very thoughtful man with many thoughts on women, sex, men and classism. I took him for another middle class, but Siegal puts it best, ‘collaboration with the class enemy’ is what has gotten him to this point. He sounds exactly as though he is the one looking down on the working class and I rather thought him to be projecting himself into this work through the cuckold that is Lady Chatterley’s husband, Clifford.

Clifford’s character was crippled and made impotent by the first world war. He is about as much of an antagonist in this as he is a victim to Connie, Lady Chatterley’s, affairs. He speaks to her after her first affair about their marriage and his love for her. He encourages her to have a child, even if it won’t be his, for Wragby, to protect this place that they both love. Lawrence writes here of an asexual ideal, a sexless marriage that is not a loveless one, but from the perspective of Connie it is a terrifying trap.

An article from Doris Lessing about Lawrence formed the base of my thoughts on the Clifford-Lawrence connection. She writes about the anti-war message, but I focussed on the part where Lawrence was apparently dying of TB as he finished Lady Chatterley’s Lover and that his own wife was off having an affair. Yet viewed through his own writing I must assume he didn’t begrudge her this, he understood. The sexless marriage was not something his protagonist could abide and she suffered for it, even when she was getting what she wanted.

Though in the 1930s I can understand the scandalous nature of this book, I can’t quite imagine it in the 60s. I read through the interviews and they seem to be aligned to my own thoughts; from the perspective of nowadays, this book is not a shocker. It is about as obscene as any number of things that I have read on Twitter this week; not counting for length or skilled prose of course. The thought of hiding the book away as I read it had not even crossed my mind until I read Betty R’s interview.

It’s a curious meeting of the now and the past. The talk of divorce and the car journeys they take (to Sheffield). But then, ‘the bitch-goddess Success’ and I remember whose work I am reading. Though I do also feel that way about success, reading it after a paragraph about the English intelligentsia is very jarring.

And that is when Mellors is introduced. Mellors is her Lover. The Lover. At first just another man to look at Connie and feel nothing more than disdain, I disliked him. I felt that Connie deserved someone to desire her how she wished to be – even if that was Michealis- rather than deal with another man who cared nothing for her. But she grows to desire him, first in the intrigue of someone new and then physically after seeing him bathing. I still dislike Mellors, I have grown close to the character of Connie after being party to her thoughts and emotions. Her second affair is longer and more passionate. But I feel that that is all it is. It is all sexual passion rather than love and sex together. I have not read any more of Lawrence’s works, so this is definitely presumptuous, but his own feelings on sex and relationships must be within this. The viewpoint being Connie’s I must assume that Lawrence himself felt or observed someone who felt they needed sexual contact to live their lives to the fullest. Connie and Clifford could live their sexless marriage together, but Lawrence declares they cannot. Clifford would not abide a man out of his own class, or any man at all, in truth even as he knows what Connie truly desires.

Lady Chatterley (and her Lover) in Sheffield

Posted on October 1, 2016 by Val Hewson

Today, Saturday 1 October, sees the end of Banned Books Week, the annual American campaign for the freedom to read. (These are the top titles challenged in the USA this year, and here are some classics which have been attacked.) So here are Reading Sheffield readers’ memories about Lady Chatterley’s Lover, perhaps one of the most famous banned books of all. (Coincidentally, a dramatisation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is on at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre until 15 October 2016.)

D H Lawrence’s novel was first published in Italy in 1928, and in an abridged version in the UK in 1932. The full version was published in the UK in 1960 by Penguin Books. Penguin was prosecuted for obscenity and won the case. The trial made headlines, and Penguin’s victory liberalised UK publishing.

As it happens, the Reading Sheffield readers were not all impressed with Lady Chatterley’s Lover. But what is important is that, thanks to the 1960 challenge by Penguin Books, they had the chance to read it and make up their own minds.

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For Mary Robertson, Lady Chatterley’s Lover was ‘the most boring book I’ve ever read!’ Her memories are vivid:

Oh yes! It was banned and then it went to court. Before that we would get it and we would pass it round and it was one you would read under the bedclothes. … The part that was thumbed was the part with the gardener. That’s the only part. I mean now it would be nothing, would it? Oh we laugh about that. … It was [sharp intake of breath] ‘I shouldn’t be reading this’, yes. I didn’t get the D H Lawrence books. They were too gritty, they were too real. I quite like some of his plays [sic] but not the books.

Eva G was also unimpressed. ‘I didn’t think it was shocking! I did think what all the fuss was about!

Anne B was younger – 14 or 15 – when she read it. She was shocked: ‘Oh yeah because I was totally innocent in those days.’ She got hold of the novel by chance:

I found my dad reading surreptitiously, which was totally…I mean it was when it was all in the papers about the …[laughing] I remember he pushed it under the pile of newspapers in the cupboard and I found it one day and I started doing the same thing and reading it surreptitiously. There was always a half hour part of the day, when I got in from school before they came back from work, that I’d got to myself and I used to read it. I worked my way through it. That was the only time and I knew I shouldn’t be doing it so I never let on. I don’t think my mother knows today that I ever read it.

Discretion was not unusual. Nurse Betty R said:

Yes, sister on the ward was reading it and she said “Would you like to read this Betty?” And she said “Keep the brown cover on it.”

Peter Mason illustrates what often happens with challenged books:

… we weren’t meant to read his [Lawrence’s] books so we read it and, looking at it now, I don’t know what all the fuss was about, because you see more about it on the TV and the news these days.

He thinks that Lady Chatterley’s Lover only ‘became famous because they banned it, I don’t think it would have…’

Alan B studied Lawrence for his Open University course and concluded that he preferred the poetry to the novels:

… he is one of these people who makes some very insightful…observations on life but you have got to read through a lot of stuff to get to them [chuckles] whereas his poems are more punchy.

Peter B read Lady Chatterley ‘even before copies were generally available’. He thinks it is now ‘a bit dated’. But Lawrence:

advanced literature in the sense that it was the first time that sort of thought had been attributed to the working class. You had to be either a business man or a lawyer or something to be written about.

Mavis was, she says, too young when she found D H Lawrence and so she ‘could not understand why it was banned’:

… I had no idea what I was reading. The sex scenes went right over my head. In fact somebody lent me a forbidden copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I could only have been about fourteen. Somebody got it from her sister who was much older and I didn’t notice why it should be banned, I couldn’t understand! (Laughs) And I look back now and think how could I possibly not have noticed what that was all about.

But Mavis does think that Lawrence changed things for her:

It both led me on to a different level of adult fiction even if I didn’t always pick up on the nuances but as I did pick up the nuances I think it made me see how people adapt, grow up, fall in and out of love – I think it went along with my development at the right age.

Anne’s Reading Journey

Posted on August 17, 2016 by Val Hewson

Anne was born in the north of Sheffield on 5 August 1944. Her parents owned a bakery in Hillsborough. Anne has been a keen reader from an early age and has remained so. She trained as a Religious Education (RE) teacher at college in Leeds and was also involved in the Girl Guide movement for many years, as both a Guide and a Guider. She has two daughters and grandchildren.

Here Anne remembers how she encountered that most notorious book, Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

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Anne read well from an early age: ‘I was away ahead,’ she says. At first it was fairy stories and nursery rhymes, and then books familiar to most people growing up in the mid-20^th century.

I was well into Enid Blyton at a fairly young age and then as I got older I sort of went more on to the classics. I remember reading The Children of the New Forest when I was about 13 and that became one of my top favourites. … The Chalet books in my early teens were my passion and I owned practically every single one at some point. I’ve still got a lot of them up in the loft.

Of the classics, David Copperfield and Jane Eyre were the ones Anne liked best, but although she tried, Jane Austen wasn’t for her. ‘I just couldn’t stick it,’ she says.

Membership of the public library and her school and college studies kept Anne reading, although she doesn’t sound as if she needed much persuasion (‘I just read anything I could get my hands on’). She belonged to Sheffield Libraries from an early age, walking there alone and choosing her books without any help from the librarians. When, at the age of 15, she transferred to the City Grammar in the centre of Sheffield, she joined the Central Library, encouraged by a friend, Kath. Kath ‘was doing literature and so was very much more into proper books, adult books’. Anne dates her transition to ‘grown-up novels’ from her friendship with Kath. In those days Anne usually looked for books which had some relevance to her history and RE courses, such as Jean Plaidy’s books on the Tudors and novels like Lloyd C Douglas’ The Robe.

No-one ever made Anne feel that reading was a waste of time. Both parents were busy with their business, but were happy for their daughter to read:

…Oh no, I mean [my mother] was an intelligent person, she knew the value of reading, she just didn’t do it.

Then our interviewer asked if Anne was ever made to feel embarrassed or guilty about reading. Only when she came across D H Lawrence, Anne replied. And the story came out.

I found my dad reading surreptitiously, which was totally…I mean it was when it was all in the papers about the …[laughing] I remember he pushed it under the pile of newspapers in the cupboard and I found it one day and I started doing the same thing and reading it surreptitiously. There was always a half hour part of the day, when I got in from school before they came back from work, that I’d got to myself and I used to read it. I worked my way through it. That was the only time and I knew I shouldn’t be doing it so I never let on. I don’t think my mother knows today that I ever read it.

Perhaps your father didn’t think he ought to be doing it either, suggests our interviewer. Probably not, Anne agrees, saying ‘he probably kept it out of sight from me’.

This happened around 1960, when Anne was a teenager. This was the time of the famous trial under the Obscene Publications Act, when Penguin Books re-published Lawrence’s novel (for the first time since its initial publication in 1928) and challenged the Director of Public Prosecutions to prosecute. The book was a huge success, with copies selling out as soon as they arrived in bookshops.

The trial, that was why everybody read it! Everybody knew about it. I did some more D H Lawrence as well.

Anne, however, did not particularly like the Lawrence novels she read. ‘ I read them but I wouldn’t say I’d want to read them again.’ She was shocked by Lady Chatterley, she says, because she was ‘totally innocent in those days’. But she