Lady Chatterley's Lover

Rating:
Summary: porn classic
Review: Published in 1928, Lady Chatterley's Lover was D. H. Lawrence's last novel--it was also his most daring and blatantly erotic work. Even by today's standards, it's erotica, or "erotic romance." Like two of his previous novels, it was banned on publication, a ban which lasted until 1960. But an uncensored edition of the book was privately printed in Italy and copies were smuggled all over Europe and America.

The storyline is quite simple--a bored wife out in the country married to a rich, feeble, annoying husband in a wheelchair falls in love (and lust) with the robust and exciting gamekeeper employed by her husband. Sooner or later things are bound to go wrong, and this can't end happily.

This isn't Lawrence's best-written novel, but it is his most groundbreaking work, as it created decades of discussion and debate about what could/should and couldn't/shouldn't be published.

David Rehak
author of Love and Madness

Rating:
Summary: "Lady Chatterly's Lover" ranks with "Ulysses"
Review: I did not read this book until ten years ago - age forty for those who count - and found it a brilliant work. It touched on every aspect of life in that era, using a difficult premise at the focus.

One reviewer called it 'sexist.' In that era, women were kept removed from the world, so men were the ones who made the initial contacts with reality and their sexuality. If Lawrence had written about that society in any other way, he would have been inaccurate. Lawrence shows the social conflict with both subtlety and brutality. Yet, Mellor IS a lover. There are sexual descriptions which are explicit, but within the coccoon of emotional bondings.

The way that Lawrence has essayed the class structure of England in that era is brave and accurate in all ways. He makes the posturing of the aristocracy both frivilous and full of assinine criteria at the same time he understands the willingness of those in power to offer their lives in the defense of the general welfare.

Lawrence notes again with unpleasant accuracy the detriments of an unchecked Industrial Revolution on the social structure of the time. He has Constance both witness these effects and suffer the olfactory damage.

This is a literary work which has an effect across the full spectrum of the possible. Finely drawn characters searching for a better way to survive their lives in a scenario that is rife with obstacles and unpleasantness. He has the touch of the finest artist working with the lightest gossamer and the blunt force of an ogre swinging a stone axe.

This was published in an abridged version because it was felt that the societal message it conveyed should be allowed to transit the draconian (by the less filtered standards of today) censorship of the era which DID focus on the sexual descriptions but could NOT stop the voice of social criticism any more than the same group could stop Dickens a few decades earlier.

Rating:
Summary: most people misunderstand this book
Review: Why does everybody think this book is about sex and adultry? Probably because it was banned, being a bit ahead of its time. In reality, this book is a lovely, wonderful metaphor for the arrival of the era of mechanization and the industrial revolution, as set against the "England of the Greenwood" (E. M. Forster). Lawrence appears to have had a fascination for this theme, as it occurs in some of his other novels as well. Far from being shunned as inappropriate for young adult readers, Lady Chatterly's Lover ought to be taught, at least at the college level, because it's a marvelous novel and should be appreciated as much, much more than a simple "dirty book."

Rating:
Summary: Very Good
Review: This was the first book by Lawrence that I ever read, and it made me want to read his other works. Something in Lawrence's style, whether it's his complete and almost unsettling way of capturing human thought and emotion, or his flawless way with language, makes you long to be 'subjected' to his words for another 300 pages.

Since Lady C's Lover was the first of his books that I read, I had the idea, not surprisingly, that all of his works would contain that purity and honesty of word choice (aka profanity) that this famous work is ripe with. Don't think this for a minute. When you read Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, and The Rainbow, you will get the feeling that Lady C's Lover was Lawrence's great mental eruption. These other works *tremble* slightly with allusions; VERY subtle allusions. It's as though Lawrence's mind was building up and preparing itself with his other works for what would be Lady Chatterley's Lover. Because, if you haven't read anything by Lawrence and know little about him, you will receive a MASSIVE surprise with this book...either a very pleasant (my case) surprise, or an unpleasant one. If you took offence at Holden Caulfield's language, your mind will scream at the language of Lady C's Lover. What we call 'the F word' in our more self-conscious moments, is used surely more than 100 times in this work. I don't think I've ever seen more straight-out connotations, allusions, imagery, everything, than in this book. It's amazing! At times, you will catch yourself marvelling at how Lawrence must have written it in a white hot fever, unable to stop, but surely knowing just how hard it would be to get this puppy published in his day and age. The work, then, is a brutal piece of honesty written, I feel, for the author's sake more than for the public's. That makes it priceless. It's one of the rare moments when we can view a writer's 'literary soul,' the part of their mind that usually will not surface for fear of not being publishable.

Whether you'd describe it as beauty, art it would be a good idea to read Lady Chatterley's Lover so that you can know for yourself what you feel about what is probably one of the greatest books ever written.

Rating:
Summary: Not a book for Youngsters
Review: Like many of us, I read this book in my late teens, but on a reread as an adult in my bookclub I realize the first time it probably went right over my head. Not because of the sex, which by today's standards is pretty tame, but for the astute observations on male and female behavior. I found Connie's ambivalence about her affair to be very believable--when with Mellors she's totally caught up in the moment, but away from him--even when pregnant with their child-- the real world intrudes and she feels ashamed. The description of the smart society of the 1920's and the casual sex was eerily modern. This book is about the conflict between nature and the industrial society, between pure sensuality and sex, between the intellectual life and the body. And parts of it are really funny!--the description of the meeting between Mellors and Connie's father is hysterical--the father is a complete buffoon. Lawrence has some odd ideas about sensuality and male power, and the brief, casual anti-Semitic throw away comments were disturbing, but all in all this was a great book.

Rating:
Summary: porn classic
Review: Published in 1928, Lady Chatterley's Lover was D. H. Lawrence's last novel--it was also his most daring and blatantly erotic work. Even by today's standards, it's erotica, or "erotic romance." Like two of his previous novels, it was banned on publication, a ban which lasted until 1960. But an uncensored edition of the book was privately printed in Italy and copies were smuggled all over Europe and America.

The storyline is quite simple--a bored wife out in the country married to a rich, feeble, annoying husband in a wheelchair falls in love (and lust) with the robust and exciting gamekeeper employed by her husband. Sooner or later things are bound to go wrong, and this can't end happily.

This isn't Lawrence's best-written novel, but it is his most groundbreaking work, as it created decades of discussion and debate about what could/should and couldn't/shouldn't be published.

David Rehak
author of Love and Madness

Rating:
Summary: Tedious
Review: His style in Lady Chatterley's Lover is amateuristic, at best. Admittedly, there are parts were the writing takes off and becomes something sublime. However, these passages are few and far between.Lawrence could not but help in adding political statements in the work against his views of the class system in England. These verbal recriminations lack real power or effect today, in the wake of the fall of the powerful socialist and communist nations. Lady Chatterley and her lover are notable socialists in a time before socialism had really taken over a nation. Their dreams and conclusions about the future are not based upon reality, rather upon unsentimental escapism and unthinking immorality. They believed the system was the problem, rather than the people who ran it. Sir Clifford, Lady Chatterley's first husband, was unwilling to chance; thus, the system which was evil would remain so. Lady Chatterley and her lover left a situation that empowered them to make change by placing their child as an heir to the aristocratic system which they blamed for England's problems. As a genre piece, this work is perhaps one of the best. Nonetheless, the overall impression of stylistic expression and thoughtfulness of theory demands I rate this work among the very worst on the great literary lists that major colleges propound as the standard of good literature.

Cheers

Rating:
Summary: greatest pseudo-literature
Review: d.h. lawrence sure is good at inflating banalities, the whole book is a mere concatenation of pseudo-intellectual, relentlessly boring blabber, some plot interspersed.
for real literature read madame bovary.

Rating:
Summary: An emotionally profound book full of insight................
Review: At the near mention of this book to a mass of people brings forth sexual notions of what people associate this work of literature and most are wrong. I found this book to be filled with intense emotional loneliness and sadness not the sexual adventure most associat with this final work of DH Lawrence.

A story of a woman(Lady Chatterly, Connie) who is married to very self involved man that is made more self involved upon his war injuries and her needs for emotional and physical intimacy. With her deep loneliness Connie begins an affair with Mellors the GameKeeper on her husbands estate and struggles with the internal morality of loving someone who is of a lesser class and her real love of him. With Mellors she adores him and needs him away from him she questions herself and feels the shame of her actions.

One of the themes I loved about the book was choice. The ability to make ones own choice and live with the consequences. Through out the book Connie makes choices she is willing to live with and Mellor never forces his will on her. She is the Mistress of her Choices and no one else. I thought it interesting that Lawrence would make her so strong willed on one hand and pschologically lonely on the other.

This book is a psychological journey of one woman and the man she loves more than it is a sexual escapade. I can see how this book was shocking in the late twenties but seems very tame today.

I found this book very sad and wouldn't recommend it to someone on prozac or other anti depressant drugs. I also found the writing very eloquent and filled with lots of quiet observations of relationships between men and women that are true today and in the future. DH Lawrence you could say was ahead of his time or you could say came at just the right time either way you should read his work.

This particular book had a introduction and forward written by others that was very insightful. Also, an afterword written by DH Lawrence himself that again extremely insightful. It is hard to beleive he was sick through out the writing and publication of this book that is wonderfully written. Perhaps that is why it is so sad. He kind of says live your life to the fullest in love and sex for life is too short.

Rating:
Summary: Sensual and raw, subtle and forthright, a true classic
Review: D.H. Lawrence touched raw nerves when this was published because it vividly addressed and described what the upper classes have been doing for ages: Having extra-marital affairs with members of their own class and those of the "lower" classes.

The book does have a few scenes of raw passion and thoughts but Lawrence was merely addressing how people feel in such affairs. He had the courage to put down those emotions into Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper, and also Lady Chatterley herself.

This IS a love story, when you get down to it. From an extra-marital affair there comes love, an awakening of the self (and in Lady Chatterley's case, a child). Apparently, more and more people in today's society are putting their desires first, otherwise, why the high divorce rate? (And the book was given much publicity when it was banned. So much so that this book couldn't land in peoples' hands fast enough. Many "illegal" copies were made and shipped to England and America, becoming an instant classic.)

I give David Herbert Lawrence all the credit in the world to address sex in an age of absolute prudishness. This stands out as a true classic of fine literature.