Lady Chatterley's Lover

Rating:
Summary: Prurience as an artistic goal
Review: "Lady Chatterley's Lover" is, I suppose, D.H. Lawrence's most famous novel, which is a shame because compared to his earlier masterpieces "Sons and Lovers," "The Rainbow," and "Women in Love" it's really not very good. It achieved its fame as one of the most censored novels in history, and the legal battles for its completely unexpurgated publication continued for decades after Lawrence's death in 1930. As far as I can tell, the censorship was caused not so much by the subject--the extramarital affairs of a woman trapped in a celibate marriage--but by the explicitly erotic scenes of sexual intercourse and especially the language, which were very daring for the time.

Lawrence sets the stage portentously on the very first page by introducing Lady Connie Chatterley's husband, the baronet Sir Clifford, as having been wounded serving in World War I, paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. With this limiting premise, in what direction could the story go other than Connie's quest to fulfill her need for a sexual relationship? She turns her romantic attention first to an unromantic Irish playwright named Michaelis and then to Clifford's gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, who is separated from a jealous, neurotic wife, while Lawrence describes the sexual encounters with considerable poetic panache. Lawrence labors nobly to make these characters interesting, but they never seem like more than cardboard cutouts of the fuller figures he so richly developed in his three major novels. They are simple people with simple thoughts and desires; their conversations are dreadfully boring.

It is surprising for a novel of such risque reputation to contain almost no surprises, but there are a few notable moments, most of which unfortunately serve to illustrate Clifford's impotence in more areas than just sexual. His wheelchair is motorized, and when one day while on a walk the motor fails and Connie and Mellors have to struggle to push him up a hill, Clifford fumes at his helplessness, his mobility at the mercy of others. This is a long, agonizing scene which seems intended to make the reader uncomfortable by cruelly emphasizing the disparity in power between the two men in Connie's life, the wealthy paraplegic and the poor but ambulatory stud. Could Lawrence have been less subtle? Did he feel, two thirds of the way into the novel, that his point had not yet been made clearly?

The narrative also suffers from some carelessly bad prose characterized by awkwardly worded metaphors ("The fine flower of their intimacy was to her rather like an orchid, a bulb stuck parasitic on her tree of life, and producing, to her eyes, a rather shabby flower.") and extraneous misoneism about the urbanization of post-World War I England caused by increasing industrialization; but I could overlook these flaws if the story had given me something more than a prurient attempt to lament the disintegration of the significance of modern marriage. What I got was a D.H. Lawrence who was not firing on all cylinders. The man wrote some great novels, but "Lady Chatterley's Lover" is not one of them.


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: 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.

Rating:
Summary: boring n not for teens
Review: D.H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover is a good book but it's not for me or other teenagers my age. I think that the book is better for adults more because of all the detailed sexual contents that were in the book. When I was reading it the information just went in and out of my head. I didn't care much about it because I didn't understand some of the sexual contents were talking about, also there was too much of it that I just got sick of it. There were parts in the book where Lawrence could have just cut short and so that we can just get to the ending faster. He just kept dragging the story on and on, and most of the things were the pretty much the same and only differences was the setting. I wasn't able to finish the book unless I skipped some of the nonsense that was in there. The book got really boring because Lawrence just kept writing the same things over and over again. There was also a lot of nonsense and when I finished the book I was like "that was stupid" "what a waste of my time". Like I said earlier, I recommend this book to adults that like romance and that doesn't mean reading all these sexual contents that is in it.

Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece in several respects.
Review: DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover remains infamous for the explicit description of sexual encounters between a upper class housewife and a laborer, and eventhough it features among the top lists of the novels written in last centuty, like many others I started reading it with suspicision. What I found was a world with vividly described characters, a frank writing to the degree it talks about all aspects of human emotion, and sexual ones too. Unlike the mainstream writers before him, Lawrence writes a powerful and passionate novel, full of sensuality and natural bursts of energy. So in some respects it is a mature novel, but it if neither porno, nor as sexual by modern standards as it was made out to be in early last century. In fact, by present standards, it does not shock any grown ups, maybe can provide the shock shared by people in 1930s and 1940s to enthusiastic readers in late teenage or early twenties, or for someone whose diet was entirely Victorian before this.

So after you get through and over with your own the prejudices and the infamous part, you start to see why Lawrence is one writer from the last century you just should not miss. His description of nature, of forests, of people, emotions, thoughts and actions of both men and women, his references to class struggles, his lyrical style and most importantly the similies swept me off my feet. His words move before your eyes, recreating beautiful imagery, reconstructing (the infamous) Connie, the laborer Mellors or Connie's cripple husband Clifford as completely humanly, falling, fearless or failing, sexually charged or bored or incapable, imaginative, passionate or hateful, lively, lusty or invalid, very lifelike people! The choice of these three characters provides him the ideal meat to create such beautiful poetic, intense prose. So much so, that after finishing this novel you rush off to the store and find yet another Lawrence level. (Picked Rainbow, was equally delighted and amazed:), but that is another story)!

I think the most important part of this novel is the sheer brilliance of the style in which it is written. Poetic short sentences, with astute comparisons and frank expression, run from sentence to sentence, and sway you in a strong current of his writing, while you are not only enjoying the ride, but also noticing the beautiful, changing, evolving scenery that you encounter at each instant. This is indeed a rich novel, packed with a natural beauty of human emotions and likes and dislikes, with poetic fervor of the writer that will grip any reader with the beauty of his prose. Unlike most other famous novels, this novel is written in simple English, is short in length, readable at breakneck speed, though so charged and passionate that you have to stop to breathe every few pages, and very open and direct, and yet has exceedingly introspective characters, the progression of their thoughts and feelings are inetgral part of the novel.

Read it. Sexuality is no more than found on any adult rating moved these days. Beauty of prose one of the best of the authors of last century. If you have always loved 19th century authors, read most of the romantic classics by Bronte sisters, Austen, Dickens or Thackerey, read this novel and notice why Lawrence shocks and yet the brilliance of his work soon shifts the spotlight to his name into one of the most important novelists of last century.

Rating:
Summary: Difficult
Review: Difficult to concentrate on, due to headaches and the fact that the narrative wasn't lively enough. Next... (C)

Rating:
Summary: most people misunderstand this book
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: She had never been loved before
Review: Lady Chatterley's Lover is not my Lawrece's favourite - see "Women in Love" for that honor-, but I think it is a very great novel, and it is praised as his best. Although the title mention The Lover, in my opinion the book is about Lady Catterley herself.

It is very interesting to imagine the effect the story might have caused on people by the time its was first published. It's known that the author had many problems in order to get it released and had to use his own money to get it printed.Even nowadays, Lady Chatterley may shock some puritans, but its effect would never be as strong as in 1928. The large use of slang names for private parts sounds a bit funny, but still disturbing.

After finish reading the book, the mainly feeling I had was: selfshiness. All characters most of the time just worry about themselves. On the other hand, I would read very naive if I believed that human beings are not natural born selfish, consequently, people in this book are very close to people we met on the streets when it comes to feelings and emotions. Clifford, the husband, is disgusting. He is a British aristocrat and as so he looks down on everybody all the time.Nobody is good enough to be an equal. Mellors, the lover, appeared to be very polite and open minded in the beginning, but I change my mind in the middle of the novel, after Lady Chatterley spends a Sunday night with him. He sounds very sexist and racist in his speech. However, I think that was the common sense by that time, today readers may feel a bit unconfortable with his opinions- as I did-, but he can still be taken to. But the real 'star' of the novel is Connie, yes, I am talking about Lady Chatterley herself. At first, Clifford takes it out on her all the time- and I felt sorry for her. Later, she finds a new love and starts living her own life - this is the best part of the book. We can't run her down having the love affair because she had such a boring and senseless life before Mellors. By the end - I won't give it - she is not the same person.

Some nice twists are saved for the last chapters, what makes the reading much more interesting. I highly recomend this book for whose who are not afraid of reading - and discovering - about sex.

Rating:
Summary: Worthy Philosophical Novel
Review: Lady Chatterly's Lover is a philosophical novel that asks questions about values and what makes a good life. In it, D. H. Lawrence considers the intellectual life and finds it arid and unreal. (Here, there is an extended, unflattering discussion of the self-promotion that a successful writer must engage in.) He then considers the effect of technology on modern life and finds that it has diminished our human qualities. Finally, he advocates a return to a simpler life where people will meet their deeper needs rather than seeking the superficial things that money can buy. The author thinks that sex has to play a pretty central role in a complete life, and he's probably right about that, but he has some very specific ideas about sex that sound odd to us now.

The author also looks deeply into the dynamics of relationships between men and women and explores what we are like, why we have trouble understanding one another, and how men and women can complement one another.

Finally, there is a fair amount of racy language and action that, of course, earned this book its notoriety.

I enjoyed this book a great deal and I think that the author's critique of modern ethics deserves some attention. It is a mistake to dismiss this book because of its overtly sexual themes.

Rating:
Summary: Worthy Philosophical Novel
Review: Lady Chatterly's Lover is a philosophical novel that asks questions about values and what makes a good life. In it, D. H. Lawrence considers the intellectual life and finds it arid and unreal. (Here, there is an extended, unflattering discussion of the self-promotion that a successful writer must engage in.) He then considers the effect of technology on modern life and finds that it has diminished our human qualities. Finally, he advocates a return to a simpler life where people will meet their deeper needs rather than seeking the superficial things that money can buy. The author thinks that sex has to play a pretty central role in a complete life, and he's probably right about that, but he has some very specific ideas about sex that sound odd to us now.

The author also looks deeply into the dynamics of relationships between men and women and explores what we are like, why we have trouble understanding one another, and how men and women can complement one another.

Finally, there is a fair amount of racy language and action that, of course, earned this book its notoriety.

I enjoyed this book a great deal and I think that the author's critique of modern ethics deserves some attention. It is a mistake to dismiss this book because of its overtly sexual themes.