Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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51 of 54 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
possibly the best book I've read, 25 Sep 2003
Although I, like many others, began reading this book due to it's risque reputation, I gained far more from it than I could have imagined. Connie's frustrations with the modern world and her desire for something better touched me, and echoed my own hidden feelings. Regardless of the manner of writing, the philosophical (some would say long-winded) side-tracking, and the sex that it is famous for, I enjoyed every page, every sentence...yes, every word. Any woman who says she cannot relate to Connie has either experienced nothing of nature or felt no yearn for love. As a 20 year old woman from the country who now lives in the town, I was entranced by the imagery of the landscape and the primal feelings it provokes within Connie, and indeed within myself.
To any woman, or indeed, man: Read this book and you won't regret a page.
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24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"We ought to be able to arrange this sex thing as if we were going to the dentist.", 22 April 2006
A book which has achieved more notoriety for its sex scenes (shocking in 1930, when the book was written) than for its character studies, Lady Chatterley's Lover focuses on the affair between Constance, the "sturdy" young wife of Clifford Chatterley, and the antisocial gamekeeper on the Chatterleys' estate in the remote midlands. Constance, Lady Chatterley, who married Clifford a month before he left for World War I, becomes his caretaker when he returns from war paralyzed from the waist down and impotent. A writer who surrounds himself with intellectual friends, he regards Connie as his hostess and caregiver and does not understand her abject yearning for some life of her own.
The distance between Constance and Clifford increases when Mrs. Bolton, a widow from the village becomes his devoted caretaker, and he becomes increasingly dependent upon her. In a remarkable scene, Clifford finally tells Connie that he'd like an heir, and he does not care whom she finds to be the father of "his" child. Connie, yearning for an emotional closeness which she has not experienced in a previous affair, soon becomes involved with Mellors, the estate's gamekeeper. Crude and anti-social, Mellors has an honesty and lack of pretension which Connie finds refreshing.
Throughout the novel, Lawrence creates finely drawn characters whose interactions and gradual changes are explored microscopically. The growth of love between Connie and Mellors is complicated by the increasing self-centeredness of Clifford, whose outrage at rumors of their affair is motivated by Connie's choice of someone so far beneath her. To Clifford, the separation of the social classes is an integral and inevitable part of life. Devoted to achieving financial success even at the expense of his workers, Clifford is depicted as a symbol of unfeeling aristocracy and government. Mellors, by contrast, is a strong man of character who stands up for what he believes, obeying his best instincts.
Dealing with themes of love, passion, respect, honor, and the need for understanding, Lady Chatterley's Lover is a complex, character-driven novel which, though dated, celebrates the driving passions which can make life worth living. The romantic scenes and language here are tame by modern standards, and the extreme behavior and willingness to flout convention by Connie and Mellors may be less realistic psychologically than what would make sense for a modern reader. Firmly rooted in the 1930's, the novel shows an insensitive Clifford adhering to the outdated values, based on outdated economic structures, while Connie and Mellors, freed from these conventions, explore their instincts and their humanity. Mary Whipple
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Lady Chatterley's coarse and humourless lover, 20 Aug 2007
D H Lawrence's most notorious novel is basically a straightforward love story with the emphasis on sex, overlain by an interesting delineation of early twentieth century class relationships. Constance Chatterley has married into minor aristocracy but her husband, disabled during the Great War, is incapable of giving her any kind of human warmth or love. He dotes on her only in her role as carer/domestic and is an extraordinarily selfish and cold man. With the arrival of Mrs Bolton from the village as her husband's full-time carer Lady Chatterley finds her life utterly empty. Sexually frustrated, she embarks on a love affair with her husband's gamekeeper, the coarse and humourless Mellors. It is a somewhat implausible cross-class relationship between a flighty young upper-class woman and a rather bitter and unpleasant working-class man. Despite Lawrence's attempt at coaxing us to believe that Lady Chatterley had found true love and tenderness, the reality is that her relationship with Mellors appears to be based on a clandestine behind-the-bike-sheds kind of sex. Because of this there is little real warmth in the book.
Of course, since the 1960s it has become fashionable to ask what all the fuss was about, but anyone with even a notion of English social history could see why the book would have caused a furore at the time: a period when illegitimate children were being removed from their mothers who in turn were often committed to institutions. To be fair, Lawrence has tried his hardest to explore the nature of human sexual relationships and you can almost feel his mind at work, but the sexual passages and language still come across as forced, crude and curiously prurient. The English have never really got to grips with sex.
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