Lady Chatterley's lover
D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), 1920
A searing, atmospheric exploration of desire, isolation, and the spiritual decay of modern industrial society. The prose moves slowly and close to the body, mixing longing and dread with long philosophical passages about nature and industrial society.
Feels like longing, melancholy and dread. About nature, society and identity.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you want a novel that takes desire and class seriously and lingers in landscape and thought. Be aware that the sexual passages are explicit and some stretches are dense with philosophical and social argument.
Why read it
It offers an intimate, unsparing look at how desire and industrial ugliness press on ordinary lives, and why private feeling can become a kind of resistance.
Pages from the book
A complete surrender to sensation, where self dissolves into the moment.
She clung to him unconscious in passion, and he never quite slipped from her, and she felt the soft bud of him within her stirring, and strange rhythms flushing up into her with a strange rhythmic growing motion, swelling and swelling till it filled her all cleaving consciousness, and then began again the unspeakable motion that was not really motion, but pure deepening whirlpools of sensation swirling deeper and deeper through all her tissue and consciousness, till she was one perfect concentric fluid of feeling, and she lay there crying in unconscious inarticulate cries. The voice out of the uttermost night, the life! The man heard it beneath him with a kind of awe, as his life sprang out into her. And as it subsided, he subsided too and lay utterly still, unknowing, while her grip on him slowly relaxed, and she lay inert. Can we find sacred beauty in the overlooked grime of modern existence?
Incarnate ugliness, and yet alive! What would become of them all? Perhaps with the passing of the coal they would disappear again, off the face of the earth. They had appeared out of nowhere in their thousands, when the coal had called for them. Perhaps they were only weird fauna of the coalseams. Creatures of another reality, they were elementals, serving the elements of coal, as the metal workers were elementals, serving the element of iron. Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. In the wake of a perfect moment, what is the feeling of immediate loss?
Ah, too lovely, too lovely! In the ebbing she realised all the loveliness. Now all her body clung with tender love to the unknown man, and blinding to the wilting penis, as it so tenderly, frailly, unknowingly withdrew, after the fierce thrust of its potency. As it drew out and left her body, the secret, sensitive thing, she gave an unconscious cry of pure loss, and she tried to put it back. It had been so perfect! And she loved it so! D. H. Lawrence.D. H. Lawrence was profoundly impacted by war, which contributed to his intense focus on visceral human experience and societal critique.
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Questions readers ask
- Is Lady Chatterley's lover for me?
- You may like it if you want a novel that takes desire and class seriously and lingers in landscape and thought. Be aware that the sexual passages are explicit and some stretches are dense with philosophical and social argument.
- What is Lady Chatterley's lover like?
- The prose moves slowly and close to the body, mixing longing and dread with long philosophical passages about nature and industrial society. Feels like longing, melancholy and dread. About nature, society and identity.
- What should I read after Lady Chatterley's lover?
- If you liked Lady Chatterley's lover, try Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy), Jacob’s Room (Virginia Woolf) and Mosses from an old manse (Nathaniel Hawthorne).
A taste of the feed
The moment when the boundaries between sight, sound, and emotion collapse.
Tess was conscious of neither time nor space. The exaltation which she had described as being producible at will by gazing at a star came now without any determination of hers; she undulated upon the thin notes of the second-hand harp, and their harmonies passed like breezes through her, bringing tears into her eyes. The floating pollen seemed to be his notes made visible, and the dampness of the garden the weeping of the garden’s sensibility. Though near nightfall, the rank-smelling weed-flowers glowed as if they would not close for intentness, and the waves of colour mixed with the waves of sound.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles · Thomas Hardy
How hard it is to believe that other people are as real as you are.
We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr. Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling—an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects—that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.
Middlemarch · George Eliot
Science can explain sin, but it cannot make it thrilling.
But the fact is, the human mind, the individual mind, has always been made more interesting by dwelling on the old riddles, even if it makes nothing of them. Science hasn’t given us any new amazements, except of the superficial kind we get from witnessing dexterity and sleight-of-hand. It hasn’t given us any richer pleasures, as the Renaissance did, nor any new sins—not one! Indeed, it takes our old ones away. It’s the laboratory, not the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world. You’ll agree there is not much thrill about a physiological sin. We were better off when even the prosaic matter of taking nourishment could have the magnificence of a sin.
The Professor’s House · Willa Cather
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