"Lady Chatterley's Lover" is a novel by D.H. Lawrence. It was written but privately printed in Florence in 1928 due to the
book's sexual implications.
Connie Reid, raised in an upper-middle class
cultured bohemian, is introduced to the inellectual and sexual liaisons while a teenager. At 23 years old, she marries Sir
Clifford Chatterley. Clifford is a wealthy and cultured mineowner in Derbyshire.
Sir Clifford was sent to war after one month of honeymoon. When he returns, a war wound has left him paralyzed, and worse, he becomes impotent. Constance grows restless in her marital confines. Briefly, she had an affair with Michaelis, a young playwright. Soon after she enters a passionate liaison with Sir Clifford's gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors.
Mellors is an ex-officer who rose from the ranks, a forthright, macho individual untainted by industrial society. From their passionate encounters at his hut, Connie becomes pregnant. At first she attempts to conceal the father's identity from her Clifford. She eventually confesses and asks him for divorce. Considering Mellors to be socially inferior and therefore, unworthy status-wise, Sir Clifford refuses to formally release her and refuses a divorce.
In the final scenes, the lovers depart and though separated – Mellors, working in a farm while Connie stays with her sister – both wait hopefully for a time, when they can break all obstacles and live life anew, together.
Note about this novel: For over 30 years, D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover" was denied full publication in England because of its sexual explicitness. There was an expurgated version, which was released in 1932 that contained none of Lawrence's detailed descriptions of the sexual act and eliminated all four-letter words. However, the unexpurgated text version became freely available in 1960 after Penguin Books publishers survived a prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act in 1959.