Were it not for the graphic sex scenes, it would be a terribly forgettable story. ( )

A classic, banned book that took me awhile to finish but when I finally did I felt successful and had a whole new understanding about the story and the reasoning behind it.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover is about a woman whose husband is an invalid and to escape from her unhappy marriage she falls into sexual relationships with various men, one longer than most, and finds that it’s just not that easy to forget your problems and run away.

It was extremely intriguing but not recommended for everyone. It’s very racy, includes crude and vulgar language and references. It would be like watching a rated R film without violence but all the sexual aspects.

If you have no boundaries, it was a very interesting story and while it took some time to get used to, I found myself curious as to the end result and what would happen to Lady Chatterley and the people surrounding her. ( )

Lady Chatterley's Lover was originally published in 1928, and was banned in many places. Now it is a classic, readily available to all and sundry and - like many classics - it isn't worth bothering with. The language and style of writing are fine - the problem lies in content. I found this novel to be bleak, depressing and pessimistic and, if this is truly Lawrence's view of life and love, then I pity him. Even given the era this was written, with it's increased industrialisation, collier strikes, the aftermath of one war and the spectre of another, surely there was still room for hope? Many people enjoy this work, but it is not for me. ( )

a classic -- must read!!! ( )

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D.H. Lawrence is such an interesting writer that even his failures are worth reading, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a bit of a failure. Today, with virulent pornography always a click away, I expected the famous sexy bits of this book to lose their shock, but I did not expect them to be comic. Yet they were, unless you do not find tropes such as “mound of Venus” rather funny. Still, these howlers came as a relief, because Lady Chatterley’s Lover is starkly humorless. Whether describing the miasma of industrialization or the rapacious drive of the clitoris, D.H. Lawrence is in deadly earnest. He shouts from the pulpit, and righteousness can never afford much laughter.

So why read it? First and least, the text is an historical landmark in development of the English novel, both for it’s famous sexual content and the even more famous censorship battles it inspired. But historical landmarks are often bores to read, and Lady Chatterley Lover, for all it’s flaws, still engages. Much of it’s allure stems from the profound and maverick strangeness of the author’s mind. By the time Lady was written, decrying the evils of industrialization was common practice. But Lawrence surpassed all his peers in pure rage. Unlike the well-to-do members of the Bloomsbury group, Lawrence was a coalminer’s son who personally witnessed the mines physically and mentally cripple the community of his childhood. Add to this fact his atavistic love of nature, rarely shared by his modernist colleagues, and imagine him watching factories level the forests and pollute the air. It was a shock to me to discover that a seemingly erotic novel turned out so unconditionally angry. And this anger explains in part why Lady still has an edge; the sex may seem silly and tame, but the molten rage beneath it continues to unnerve.

Much to his credit, Lawrence did not merely condemn industrial society, he proposed an alternative. Now, his solution, taken in the extreme manner in which he believed in it, is where the book shows its age. “Organic Fucking” is the best summary I can give his vision of redemption. It is the fierce ancestor of the milk toast “Make Love Not War” ethos of the 1960s. “Mound of Venus” references aside, I believe Lawrence would ultimately reject the willed naiveté of the hippy movement; he was too discerning, too acquainted with struggle and sacrifice, to merely hold up the flower and bliss out. But both Lawrence and the flower children drew on adolescent fantasies in order to overthrow grim realities. Like all utopian visions, it ultimately failed. Lawrence shares this fate with another articulate and outraged enemy of industrialization, John Ruskin.
Yet while their respective solutions failed, Lawrence and Ruskin’s fiery salvos against modernity cannot be easily dismissed, nor can their willingness, at great personal sacrifice, to try and build a better world than the one they saw around them.

But Lawrence’s fighting spirit does not mark the beginning and end of his appeal. While even in his more successful works his writing is uneven, with clods of purple pose choking the flow of the page, at is best it is nigh perfect: sensuous yet limpid, reaching depths of emotion that seldom surface on the cool waters of English prose. At times he manages to combine dazzling complexity of language with a irresistible primitivism of feeling, like a frightening ancient and barbaric statue wrapped in exquisite lace. Once more, his insight into the relationships of men and women are unsurpassed in all of English literature. No one has written on that ancient subject with such honesty, observation, and intelligence. And this is the real reason that I still enjoy Lawrence, for all of his flaws. As I write this I have been married to a woman for five years, and I hope for many years to come. Lawrence helps me make sense, and ultimately helps me better appreciate, this wonderful, frightening, protean, beloved, despairing, baffling, joyous, mercurial bond that is a cornerstone of my life. ( )

This is the 1st North American printing of D H Lawrence's uncensored, unedited Lady Chatterley's Lover

Well, I think this is my third attempt at a classic and I'm still not feeling any fonder of them. I'm positive that there are many insights that one is supposed to get from reading this novel and I'm also positive they all flew right over my head. I have to admit to skimming over some of the more dreary and draggy parts that just went on and on but didn't accomplish anything-I know naughty me but it couldn't be helped.

I do think the premise of the story is good. Connie is married to Clifford who was hurt in the war and confined to a wheelchair. Connie, being a young woman, starts to realize that she's missing a lot in terms of being loved by a man, both physically and mentally. Not to mention that she wants children and this is something that Clifford will never be able to give her although he says that if she were to get pregnant with another man's child he would raise it as his own and it would be his heir.

So, Connie embarks upon one affair that leaves her upset and empty and she becomes even more depressed. After a while she comes in contact with the game-keeper, Mellors, and falls in love with him, has an affair and becomes pregnant. She has become disgusted with anything and everything to do with Clifford and doesn't want to be with him at all anymore. She leaves on a trip with her sister with intentions of never returning. She asks Clifford for a divorce, which he denies. So, Mellors ends up working on some farm in the end and waiting for Connie to come to him or at least that's what I understood to be happening.

I can see why this novel would have been banned back in the days of 1928 although I disagree with banning books on any level. My thoughts are if you find the material offensive, don't read the book. However, there is a fair amount of bad language in this book and fairly explicit sexual content. I'm not easily offended and truthfully I found some of Lawrence's descriptions of things downright amusing.

There were pieces of Lawrence's writing that I really liked-he is very descriptive with all things. In this section Connie is having a little spat with Clifford and she is thinking to herself:
'He seemed to sit there like a skeleton, sending out a skeleton's cold grizzly will against her. Almost she could feel the skeleton clutching her and pressing her to its cage of ribs'.
This was just an amazing play on words in my opinion.

So, ultimately I didn't love it but I didn't hate it either. Now it's on to Little Women which I'm reading for both my Book Club and The Classics Challenge and I'm really looking forward to it.

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Sir Clifford Chatterley (partially a self-portrait of author D.H. Lawrence) is a frustrated writer who thinks he knows Everything about Everything, but he is actually an embittered and impotent World War I veteran suffering from PTSD. His wife Connie finds solace in his gamekeeper's hut and in the gamekeeper's bed, discovering The Joy of Sex decades before Alex Comfort coined the term.

Here, the prose of Lawrence is occasionally purple, it is occasionally profane, it is occasionally full of nearly incomprehensible dialect. But it's never dull. However, if you laugh whenever you see the words "loins" or "bowels" in connection with human intercourse, you might want to avoid this book!!! ( )

I really loved this book, although it's been years since I read it. I loved the romance and the setting. Risky for it's time, the subject of sexual incompatibility was addressed and the need for a healthy marital realtionship, something polite society did not "talk about" when if first published. I'm glad it survived being banned in so many places and can be read with better thought and tolerance today. This aside, it's a lovely story and a beautiful read....very romantic. ( )

I'm a babe in the world of D.H. Lawrence. I was assigned Lady Chatterley's Lover as a college assignment in Brit Lit 203. I read the Cliff Notes. I got a B-minus in the course. And that was forty years ago.

Yes, I was the guy who never showed for morning classes, and closed the student pub. And at times, I was even the night watchman. So it should come as no surprise that when I finally got around to reading the book, last week, it was already the next century . A bit late. But better than never. Maybe even a form of a haute snobisme, my preferring to read dead authors AND be taught by dead professors?

But now at least I have an authentic and passionate opinion on the novel.

D.H.Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover is punk rock, in the finest sense. Sex pistols indeed. Anarchy in the UK - turn it up!. The book had me, using just three power chords: the conflict between classes, the barriers to sexual honesty, and the profound exploitation of the environment by capitalism.

These were issues, for Lawrence, in England after the Great War of 1914. They remain issues world-wide to this day. Lawrence, speaking sometimes through the character of Mellors, and sometimes through Lady Chatterley, is prophetic in his pessimism. The gap between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless, has not been addressed by a rise in the overall standard of living in the West. Global consumerism is laying waste to the Arctic, Africa and the Amazon. And, ironically, enormous technical advances in communications media, have only added barriers to honest conversation. Like OMG how much of yourself should you reveal if it might be texted, myspaced, youtubed and there for all, on Google, in perpetuity?

It's hard not to love this novel for its underlying courage and outrage. And, its wit. I'm glad I never read it until 2008. In 1968, all my peers were rebelling, each to his or her own banner. Lawrence would have elicited a "So?" from me then. Now, many of my peers drive SUVs, live in McMansions, vote Republican, and kow-tow to evangelicals. Now I understand better, what a rare and brave cri de coeur this novel is. ( )

It can be said right out that if it were not for the controversy surrounding this book's depictions of sexuality, no one would have heard of it or cared about it. It's a mid-range Lawrence novel, interesting but hardly his best work. The prose is poetic yet often overwrought, Lawrence's attempts to copy lower-class British dialect are painful, the characters are fairly static and not a whole lot actually happens that is worth reading about. However, the book somehow manages to rise above these faults to somehow actually be a good read. There are flashes of brilliance and beauty scattered throughout, allow this to rise above the romance novel mediocrity and occasionally reach the transcendence Lawrence was capable of in his best work.

(This review originally appeared on zombieunderground.net) ( )

I read this book when I was still a kid. It was raining out, and I was bored. I didn't think I'd like it, since classics can be boring. To my surprise, I enjoyed it, and I still think back on it to this day.

DH Lawrence is, of course, a really amazing writer and there were some passages that have stayed with me all this time. The bit about there being plenty of fish in the sea, but if you aren't the right sort of fish (herring, mackeral?) then really there weren't that many fish in the sea. He said it better of course!

I also really appreciated the depiction of intimacy. Sex as something imperfect and flawed yet still moving and meaningful. The focus on intimacy through imperfection was so new to me. I understand it more now than I did then, and I'm kind of amazed at how well Lawrence wrote the female character's experience so well.

I'm really glad I read this book. I wonder if it isn't about time for a re-read! ( )

I was a bit disappointed in this book for a few reasons. The first being that I never really got a clear picture of any of the characters. It was probably just me, but I felt there were contradictions all over the place when they were being described (and it was throughout the whole book, not just the beginning). One moment Clifford seemed to be strong and the next moment weak (physically, not mentally). If the physical description of him was supposed to be symbolic of his mental strength, I didn't find it to be very effective. I couldn't like Connie at all; Mellors was perhaps the only character I had any real understanding and liking of.

I also found the text a bit too repetitive for my liking. I'm not referring to the parts where a single phrase or word was repeated - I could handle that. My problem was where whole ideas were repeated and ruminated over ad nauseum. I like a bit of deep conversation in a book, particularly when it concerns the state of humanity, but the long passages of dialogue and thoughts bored me to tears in this book.

The beginning was very drawn out and not particularly interesting, however, it seemed to pick up a little around the time that Connie and Mellors were first meeting, before becoming boring again. It then seemed to be in a big damn hurry to finish.

I'm glad I read the book, if only so I can better understand its importance in the history of literature, but I'll not be reading it again. ( )

The quintessential banned book and more brilliant, warm, tragic and beautiful for being so. A landmark in English literature. ( )

At the end of the first page, you already have an appreciation for Lawrence's talent as a writer. This work is a classic because he applies that talent to convey both the stark reality and the subtle nuances of human relationships - even our human state in modern times (e.g, "And that is how we are. By strength of will we cut off our inner intuitive knowledge from our admitted consciousness. This causes a state of dread, or apprehension, which makes the blow ten times worse when it does fall."). Lawrence wrote a propos that explains his intent and expands on his points. He believed that modern man and woman had lost touch with their real emotions, especially about love. They were instead getting by on counterfeit feelings, almost to the point of completely obliterating the real human sense. And this played out in marriage more significantly because of the role of marriage in society. ( )

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I won't discount this book, since it has had a profound effect on the history of literature, and it's good. But it's not my favorite of Lawrence, nor is it entirely well written. It seems like most of its fame is a result of it being controversial, rather than groundbreaking in a literary sense. It is good, it's just not up there with Sons and Lovers in my list of favorites. ( )

My second Lawrence book and he is turning into one of my favourite writers. This didn’t disappoint. In fact, in places, this unexpurgated 1928 edition downright startled me.

Considering it was written in 1928, waaaaaay before the so-called sexual revolution of the 60s, this was a bold move. But, before we get sidetracked, the book isn’t about...

read the rest of Arukiyomi's review. ( )

Sexy after all these years. Worth the read! ( )

Have read LCL three times now and it doesn't get any better, I just tend more to annoy, it doesn't age well and only holds onto it claim as a classic for the furore that it caused on publication. A badly written bodice ripper.

Wasn't impressed at all. I think I read it expecting really salacious stuff, and was completely blind to its qualities. So I'm due for a re-read. ( )

First impressions are important and the instant impression that came to me is that D. H. Lawrence had a profound respect for women, seeing them as intelligent, rational, capable creatures with an innate sense and love of freedom.

One quote that really leapt out at me from page 2 and gave me a warm chuckle was in mentioning the youth of Constance and her sister: "They had been sent to Dresden at the age of fifteen, for music among other things. And they had had a good time there. They lived freely among the students, they argued with men over philosophical, sociological and artistic matters, they were just as good as the men themselves: only better, since they were women."

Despite this respect and deep emotional attachment, there were strange incongruities in the leading lady’s character: Although Constance seems to genuinely care for her husband, it surprised me that she shows absolutely no guilt over sleeping with other men -even going so far as to say to one lover, "I don't want Clifford to know... not even to suspect. It would hurt him so much. But I don't think it's wrong, do you?"

She seems to be able to separate emotion and affection from the act of having sex in a way that isn't normally portrayed in female characters of this era -certainly not in such a sympathetic light. I found this a very interesting approach, especially from a male author born in the tale-end of the 19th Century!

There was other moment where the four men (Constance’s husband and his three friends) are talking, it is mentioned that talking intellectually to a woman should be no different to sleeping with her. They “performed” better with Constance in the room (albeit silently). Were they then, by their own intellectual standards, making love to her in Clifford's stead? Wass he, in a way, being complicit, even at this early stage, in her being with other men?

Conversely, this seemed to be contradicted within the same chapter: Marriage is spoken of in terms of labels of ownership between spouses, with them each becoming an extension of the other. As Clifford is, due to his disability, sexless, is Constance then sexless by extension? Is this why, Tommy Dukes can say "sh*t" in front of Constance, despite claiming to be unable to do so in front of a woman? Is she considered, in this way, an “un-woman”?

The complexity of relationships; marital, familial and those of friendship, is explored with the some of the most beautiful language – even the use of “the C-word” seemed quite natural and didn’t offend in the least (in fact, it was used in such an affectionate manner it seemed almost a term of endearment, which was a new one on me!) – instead, it was gentle and completely non-derogatory in its context.

It's the first I've read by D H Lawrence, and I will certainly read more of his work. I've read other books set during a similar period, but in different areas and slightly different social sets (for example, The Great Gatsby focuses more on the American party set; A Taste of Blood Wine is 99% set in England and, again, features more of a social scene; P G Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories are also very social, with lots of visiting other people and places). This felt more stationary and confined, which, I think, added to the feeling that Constance was trapped in a place and marriage that did not make her happy.

I expected it to be a lot more steamy than it actually was - it turned out to be quite demure by comparison to some other "erotic" novels (such as Fanny Hill by John Cleland). Overall, I enjoyed every moment. I spent a lot longer reading this book than I usually do (mostly because I was so exhausted from jury duty all last week), but I savoured every last second of it. It was rather a refreshing read ( )

I was really disappointed by this one. I thought it would be so much better. I can understand why it was banned, of course, with all the "racy" parts (when it was published). But I found it to be - really - quite badly written; and this surprised me. I felt, for example, like he was repeating himself in the descriptions of the love scenes, using the same words and frases.. felt very unoriginal and "soap opera-script-like".. I was not impressed by this. I generally love romances, love- and relationship dramas and appreciate sensual/erotic books, but this one... no. Somehow I didn't find the relationships and the characters' interactions believable.. Between the lines, it always felt a bit like he was just trying to be sensational for the sake of being sensational, with the love scenes, sort of, you know. No, DH Lawrence is not my cup of tea.. I also read half of "The Rainbow" and I felt the same (like he repeats himself, over and over).. so I couldn't go on. I don't think he writes good.. sensational, yes, but not good. There's no real feeling. It felt just carbon-figure-like. Fake and platonic despite the "hot scenes" (hey, you don't have to agree). ( )

The classic “banned” novel. Lady Chatterley, even though Lord Chatterley is paralyzed from the waist down (or because he is), takes a lover. In my opinion, if it weren’t for the frank depictions of sex, this novel would have faded into obscurity long ago.

If I had to stick this novel into a category, I would say that is really polemical, not a romance. Lawrence seems to be trying to make a point about the plight of the workers. He calls them Bolshevists, which we would probably call socialism or communism. And considering how Britain has turned out, he was probably perceptive. Even the couple, with Lady Chatterley in one class and her lover in another, reflect the polemical theme. Leave out the sex, or describe it in a more off-stage manner, and that is really what we are left with; a commentary on the social problems of the age.

The sex scenes are frank, probably shocking at the time they were written, but compare them now to, for instance, “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love” for a real shocker. And Lawrence really loves to use the exclamation point! But the couple seems hopelessly self-centered by my own standards.

And the ending is particularly unsatisfying. Lawrence ends it with more petty allusions to sex, meant to shock it seems to me, but ultimately silly.

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