Lady Chatterley's Lover

we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road

on. The war had brought the roof down over her head

honeymoon. Then he went back to Flanders: to be shipped over to England again six months later, m

For two years he remained in the doctor's hands. Then he was pronounced a cure, and could re

They came to start housekeeping and married life in the rather forlorn home of the Chatterleys on a rather inadequate income. Clifford had a sister, but she had departed. Otherwise there were no near

ir with a small motor attachment, so he could drive himself slowly round the garden and into the l

py, with his ruddy, healthy-looking face, arid his pale-blue, challenging bright eyes. His shoulders were broad and strong, his hands were very strong. H

anxious brightness of his eyes, how proud he was, after the great shock, of being alive. But he had been so muc

r was the once well-known R. A., old Sir Malcolm Reid. Her mother had been one of the cultivated Fabians in the palmy, rather pre-Raphaelite days. Between artists and cultured socialists, Constance and her sister Hilda had had what might be called an aesthetically unconvent

ideal politics. It was their natural atmosphere. They were at once cosmopolitan and pr

as the men themselves: only better, since they were women. And they tramped off to the forests with sturdy youths bearing guitars, twang-twang! They sang the Wandervogel songs, and they were free. Free! That was the great word. Out in the open world, out in

ng so lustily and camped under the trees in such freedom wanted, of course, the love connexion. The girls were doubtful, but then the thing was so much

f primitive reversion and a bit of an anti-climax. One was less in love with the boy afterwards, and a little inclined to hate him, as if he had trespassed on one's privacy and inner freedom. For, of course, being a gir

omen had always known there was something better, something higher. And now they knew it more definitely than ever. The beautiful pure freedom of a woman was infini

inner, free self. That the poets and talkers about sex did not seem to have taken sufficiently into account. A woman could take a man without really giving herself away. Certainly she could take him without giving herself into his power. Rather she could use this sex thin

were profoundly interested, TALKING to one another. The amazing, the profound, the unbelievable thrill there was in passionately talking to some really clever young man by the hour, resuming day after

It marked the end of a chapter. It had a thrill of its own too: a queer vibrating thrill inside the body, a final spasm of self-assertion,

when Hilda was twenty and Connie eighteen, their father

fulfil themselves'. She herself had never been able to be altogether herself: it had been denied her. Heaven knows why, for she was a woman who had her own income and her own way. She blamed her husband. But as a matter of fact, it

the passion of mental attraction. All the wonderful things the young men thought and expressed and wrote, they thought and expressed and wrote for the young women. Connie's young man was musical,

ation it makes, both in the body of men and women: the woman more blooming, more subtly rounded, her young angularities softened, and her expressio

ience, let their souls go out to her. And afterwards looked rather as if they had lost a shilling and found sixpence. Connie's man could be a bit sulky, and Hilda's a bit jeering. But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don't

their mother's funeral. Before Christmas of 1914 both their German young men were dead: whereupon the sis

t of voice, and an ultra-sensitive sort of manner. Hilda, however, suddenly married a man ten years older than herself, an elder member of the same Cambridge group, a man with a fair amount of money, and a comfortable family job in the government: he also wrote philosophical essays.

was a Clifford Chatterley, a young man of twenty-two, who had hurried home from Bonn, where he was studying the technicalities of coal-mining. He had pre

do intelligentsia, but he was aristocracy. Not the big sort, but still it

was shy and nervous of all that other big world which consists of the vast hordes of the middle and lower classes, and foreigners. If the truth must be told, he was just a little bit frightened of middle-and lower-c

e Reid fascinated him. She was so much more mistress of herse

against convention and against any sort of real authority. Fathers were ridiculous: his own obstinate one supremely so. And governments were ridiculous: our own wait-and-see sort espe

ridiculous to a degree. And as far as the governing class made any pretensions to govern, they were ridiculous too. Sir Geoffrey, Clifford's father, was intensely ridiculous, choppin

t, the elder brother and heir, laughed outright, though it was his trees that were falling for trench props. But Clifford only smiled a little uneasily. Everything was ridiculous, qui

fee for the children. In all these things, of course, the authorities were ridiculously at fault. But Cliffor

mad hatter's tea-party for a while. Till things developed over there, and Lloyd George came to s

ld of Wragby, was so ingrained in him, he could never escape it. And yet he knew that this too, in the eyes of the vast seething world, was r

might. So cut off he was, so divorced from the England that was really England, so utterly incapable, that he even thought well of Horatio Bottomley. Sir Geoffrey stood for England and Lloyd Geo

in was he himself any further ahead, except in a wincing sense of the ridiculousness of everything, and the paramou

eath and horror. A man needed support arid comfort. A man nee

a sense of the weakness of their position, a sense of defencelessness, in spite of, or because of, the title and the land. They were cut off from those industrial Midlands in which they passe

ffrey wanted Clifford to marry. Sir Geoffrey barely mentioned it: he spoke very little. But h

and she felt his marrying would be a desertion and a betr

were so close, he and she, apart from that. And Connie exulted a little in this intimacy which was beyond sex, and beyond a man's `satisfaction`. Clifford anyhow was not just keen on his `satisfaction', as so many men seemed to be. No, the intimacy was deeper, more p

ed home smashed, and there was no ch