108. Lady Chatterly’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence

History: Printed in Florence, Italy, in 1928, it was not printed in the United Kingdom until 1960. The publication of the book caused a scandal due to its explicit sex scenes, including previously banned four-letter words and perhaps because the lovers were a working-class male and an aristocratic female. The story is said to have originated from events in Lawrence's own unhappy domestic life, and he took inspiration for the settings of the book from Ilkeston in Derbyshire where he lived for a while. When it was published in Britain in 1960, the trial of the publishers, Penguin Books, under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 was a major public event and a test of the new obscenity law. The 1959 act (introduced by Roy Jenkins) had made it possible for publishers to escape conviction if they could show that a work was of literary merit. One of the objections was to the frequent use of the word "fuck" and its derivatives. Various academic were called as witnesses, and the verdict, delivered on 2 November 1960, was "not guilty". This resulted in a far greater degree of freedom for publishing explicit material in the UK. The prosecution was ridiculed for being out of touch with changing social norms when the chief prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, asked if it were the kind of book "you would wish your wife or servants to read".
Plot: It is the story of Connie, Constance Reid, who marries Sir Clifford Chatterley in 1917 only to have him wounded in the war such that he must be confined to a wheelchair permanently soon afterwards. After a brief affair with Michaelis the playwright that leaves her unsatisfied, Lady Chatterley enjoys an extremely passionate relationship with Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on their estate. The later stages of the novel move onto the issue of her pregnancy by Mellors and her trip to Venice to disguise the true parentage of the child. The truth is eventually uncovered and the novel ends with a sense of fulfillment for both Lady Chatterley and Mellors although the situation is never fully resolved.
Review: I listened to this book. This book describes sex and orgasms and erections in more detail than any other book I have ever read, in an almost a nonsexual level. Like separating the sex from sexual. He explains how he believes sex will be as it was intended when our sexual lives and our sexual thoughts are in harmony because mind and body should be in harmony.
Opening Line: "Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically."
Closing Line: "John Thomas says good night to Lady Jane, a little droopingly, but with a hopeful heart."
Quotes: “There is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen."
"And he stuck flowers in the hair of his own body, and wound a bit of creeping-jenny round his penis, and stuck a single bell of a hyacinth in his navel. She watched him with amusement, his odd intentness. And she pushed a campion flower in his moustache, where it stuck, dangling under his nose."
“her spirit seemed to look on from the top of her head, and the butting of his haunches seemed ridiculous to her, and the sort of anxiety of his penis to come to its little evacuating crisis seemed farcical. Yes, this was love, this ridiculous bouncing of the buttocks, and the wilting of the poor, insignificant, moist little penis. This was the divine love!”
Rating: okay but D.H. Lawrence is a poet.