Lady Chatterley’s Lover, is something besides a dirty book from 1928.
I think the controversy overshadows the main thrust (har, har) of the book, which is a plaintive lament about how industrialization is ruining people. I’d like to think that D.H. Lawrence was wrong–we’re not all that pathetic, and we certainly haven’t extinguished ourselves.
So anyway, if you want to read this book, realise that you’re going to get a big dose of the social issues of post-WWI England, and purple passagery of what D.H. Lawrence thinks a woman’s orgasm is like. Oh, and such plum phrases as “Tha’s got a pretty arse!”
Heh. I got sent to the principal’s office in fourth grade for reading this book in school (I’d worked my way through the “young readers” section a couple of years previous and was steadily plowing through adult fiction). I can’t say that I really understood much of it at the time, but boy did I like the “purple prose”, along with the nude Classic paintings in the “P” volume of the World Book Encyclopedia (which is still more erotic than the vast majority of online porn).
I reread Lady Chatterly’s Lover a few years ago and was less than impressed. Lawrence was good with imagry, but he was pendantic about the above-mentioned social issues and lackadaisical regarding plot, character development, or indeed, reader interest. It’s not on my list of great books, needless to say.
Tip - some sections of dialogue are written as a phonetic representation of the North Nottinghamshire accent and it can be a wee bit tricky, imagine Sean Bean (who played Mellors in an early 90s TV version) saying the lines and that’ll help.
BTW Giant_Spongess if you like “Tha’s got a pretty arse!” you’ll love the comment called after me by the stallholder of the secondhand book stall in Mansfield market where I bought my copy … “Tha’ll go blind reading that duck!”
