Lady Chatterley's Lover: Introduction by John Sutherland (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series) - Hardcover

Lawrence, D. H.

 
9781101908402: Lady Chatterley's Lover: Introduction by John Sutherland (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1101908408 ISBN 13: 9781101908402
Verlag: Everyman's Library, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

Famously banned for indecency, Lawrence’s final novel is one of the most notorious and passionate love stories in literature.

Constance Reid, Lady Chatterley, is a young woman trapped in an unfulfilling marriage to an aristocrat whose war wounds have left him paralyzed. After her husband demands that she provide him with an heir, she enters into a liaison with their gamekeeper, a working-class man named Oliver Mellors. As their illicit relationship grows in tenderness, mutual respect, and sensual passion, Constance discovers that true fulfillment requires a real connection of both mind and body. Shocking to its original audience for its cross-class romance as well as for its explicit depictions of sex, the novel has long been hailed as the summit of Lawrence's artistic achievement and one of the most influential novels of the twentieth century.




Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE (1885–1930), the prolific novelist, poet, and travel writer, was born in Nottinghamshire, England.His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1911, and the next year he published Sons and Lovers. His masterpieces The Rainbow and Women in Love were completed in quick succession, but the first was suppressed as indecent and the second was not published until 1920. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was published in 1928, but it was banned in England and the United States for indecency. He died of tuberculosis in 1930 in Venice.

JOHN SUTHERLAND is a British academic, newspaper columnist, and author. He is Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London. He has twice served as a judge for the Booker Prize and writes regularly for The Guardian.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

From the Introduction by John Sutherland

Novels that manifestly change society rarely happen. Two have, incontrovertibly, altered worldview and, one can plausibly claim, the world itself. Both had something of the unexploded bomb about them. Nineteen Eighty-Four came out in 1949. It was initially seen as another H. G. Wells-style dystopia. Its sales were moderate.

It was not until the 1954 BBC-TV version that the seriousness of what Orwell was saying hit home and readers, en masse, turned to the novel, realising that Nineteen Eighty-Four was not pulp science fiction but a tract for its times and for ous.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover, was regarded as an ‘obscene publication’ when it came out in 1928 and was prosecuted and legally suppressed as filth in Britain and America for three decades. But pornography as Lawrence insisted is precisely what his novel was not. Its instruction to humanity was opposite. ‘Sex in the head’ (pornography) should, Lawrence believed, be replaced by fulfilling love as an exchange of whole bodies in a spirit of mutual reverence.

It's a tall order. At the 1960 UK trial which, finally, ‘acquitted Lady Chat’, with momentous consequence for literary freedoms, the Bishop of Woolwich (John Robinson) testified, as an expert witness under oath, that the seven acts of love described in Lady Chatterley’s Lover ‘were acts of holy communion’. The prelate’s claim was mocked but had Lawrence been at the Old Bailey that day he would have nodded approval.

Both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Lady Chatterley’s Lover were written by novelists with little time left to make their point. Both were in advanced stages of tuberculosis---‘the poet’s disease’. They knew the end was near every time they coughed blood. The myth, associated with John Keats, is that TB (in Keats’s day called ‘consumption’) heightens literary genius.

It certainly instils urgency. Orwell, by the time his novel was published, had seven months to live. Lawrence had eighteen months after Lady Chatterley’s Lover saw print (it had taken him three years to write). They had Cassandra’s brief moment with the hope that unlike Troy’s seer they would be taken notice of.

The novels, to make a final point of comparison, are radically different. Orwell was a political thinker; Lawrence a quasi-religious prophet. But they breathe the same in articulo mortis, point of death, hurry-up. One feels it in the barking sentences and chipped sententiae of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. At times Lawrence virtually shouts from the page. The overall tone of the novel is declarative: it admits no contradiction from the first sentence, ‘Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically’, onwards.

The novel’s plot is easily summarised. ‘Telling’ is not where Lawrence’s complexities lie. ‘Meaning’ is. As the narrative opens it is England around 1922--24. The slow bruise of the ‘Great War’ has risen to the surface. England aches. Lawrence, married as he was to a German baroness, thought the war to have been ‘false and inhuman’. Lady Chatterley’s Lover intimates that verdict throughout.

The novel is set regionally in the ‘uneasy midlands’; where David Herbert Lawrence was born into a mining community in 1885. For his first fifteen years he was a Victorian---for the remainder of his life an adamant anti-Victorian. His attitude to his social and class roots is complex and is twisted into the narrative braid of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Young ‘Bert’ Lawrence, who was not strong, escaped the destiny of other children of his class but remained attached by filaments which, he believed, only the art of fiction was sensitive enough to delineate. Why, in the novel, does its hero Oliver Mellors, who began working life as a miner but escaped into the officer and gentleman class, come back as a two-pounds-a-week gamekeeper to raise prey for that most aristocratically purposeless of pastimes, pheasant shooting?

Why did Lawrence---in the month before starting to write Lady Chatterley’s Lover and having been seven years a ‘passionate pilgrim’ across the face of the earth---return to his birthplace, Eastwood, and walk round the haunts of his childhood with an old friend? The region was in the midst of a five-month miners’ strike. Families were near starving. It was ‘cataclysm’. The village in which he brought was a living hell (the novel depicts that hellishness in Chapter 11).

Lawrence did not stay, but what he saw in his native Eastwood (‘Tevershall’ in the novel) would mature into his last great address to the world. He began writing as soon as he and Frieda returned to Florence where they were currently residing and could breathe clean air.
The anti-hero of the novel, Clifford Chatterley, is a clever but cynical younger scion of an aristocratic family. When Lord Kitchener calls, he follows his brother, Herbert, heir to the Chatterley estate, to war. They are willing to die for ‘their’ England, an unfairly large portion of which their family has owned for two hundred years. Herbert is killed: Clifford survives to inherit the Chatterley title and properties when his father expires ‘of chagrin’.

Clifford married in 1917, the ‘worst year of the war’. His wife, Constance (‘Connie’) Reid, is of Scottish gentry background, the daughter of a society painter of minor fame. Although not quite as ‘tip top’ in rank as her husband she is now ‘Lady’ Chatterley. She carries the title uneasily.
Sir Clifford returned a maimed hero. His spine was shattered in battle. He is dead from the waist down and sentenced to a wheel-chair for life. No heir can be bred from his ‘loins’ (a word used with biblical resonance by Lawrence). His and Connie’s ‘married’ life has been one month’s bleak wartime honeymoon. Now the owner of Wragby Hall and its extensive estate with profitable coal mines virtually on its front lawn, it is Sir Clifford’s born duty to maintain the Chatterley dynasty. He owes it to the England his brother gave his all to save. Clifford gave half his body. Whether England in its present state is worth saving, or even living in, is a pivot on which the novel turns.

The novel neither invites the reader to admire nor to warm towards Clifford. Even less when he instructs Connie, in the interest of Wragby, to find someone eligible to impregnate herself by. Without a male heir the house of Chatterley will fall. Clifford lays down one criterion: the future donor must be ‘our sort’. No Venetian gondoliers (a couple appear in the narrative) or lower-class men, however handsome or heroic, are acceptable. Even spermatozoa have class identity.
On discharge from military care Clifford made himself a smart ‘almost famous’ belletrist. His work, like he himself, is elegant and sterile. Constance’s first adultery, on behalf of the Chatterley line, is with a rootlessly cosmopolitan playwright, Michaelis, an author more renowned than Clifford. But cheap because too renowned. Fame has something vulgar about it. Lawrence told his agent that Lady Chatterley’s Lover was ‘far too good for the public … for the gross public’. Michaelis’ fortune comes from that gross source.

The heroine’s name at this stage of the novel assumes ironic resonance. Constance Chatterley is, by marital demand, an inconstant wife. Her forename as shortened to ‘Connie’;...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Everyman's Library
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1101908408
ISBN 13 
9781101908402
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
408
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
GPSR Kontakt
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780451531957: Lady Chatterley's Lover (Signet Classics)

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0451531957 ISBN 13:  9780451531957
Verlag: Signet, 2011
Softcover