The intelligent, young Constance Reid marries Sir Clifford Chatterly, a bigoted intellectual paralyzed during WWI. Her husband brings her the intellectual connections and pursuits she wanted, but Lady Chatterly's life has become sterile and lifeless without physical love. She fills that need with a working man from the lower classes, and discovers a few truths about the nature of human relationship. Set in a class-based time and society, the story explores more than the intimate components of human love. D.H. Lawrence's last novel refracts human relationship like a prism. Each facet of physical, mental, and social desire and fulfilment is lit from within by the time and place of one woman's story.
Born in 1885,David Herbert Lawrence, grew up in a working-class family in Nottinghamshire, England. His father was a coal miner and his mother worked in a lace factory. Lawrence began writing poetry while he studied to become a teacher. Qualified in 1908. he taught for only a few years before devoting himself to writing full time. His health was fragile throughout his life, and he died in 1930. He spent most of his adult life living in many countries outside England and owned a ranch outside Taos, New Mexico, USA at the time of his death.
He was a firm pacifist and believed in the physicality of love and human interaction. His writing was ahead of its time in its frank treatment of flirtation, seduction, and sex. As a result, he was a controversial figure even before the storm of criticism and public attempts to censor the explicit (but also literary) language of his last novel, Lady Chatterly's Lover.
Lady Chatterly, the book's central character, is a
dissatisfied married woman who takes a lover, a theme explored in
other famous works like Middlemarch, Anna Karinina and Madame
Bovary. D.H. Lawrence tells the story with quite explicit language.
His twentieth-century frankness also challenges older social norms
by dissecting the crumbling class system of his time, revealing its
pernicious role as a hinderance to genuine human
interaction.