Lady Chat Chat – Uncensored

Lady C: The Long Sensational Life of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by Guy Cuthbertson

published 2026

 

Oh what perfect joy this was.

I read DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover when I was a teenager, because of course we all did – banned for years, controversial and full of sexy bits. I was a keen reader of Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1970s literary feminism at its finest) and she had a long section on Lawrence, and particularly on Lady C.

I read it through her eyes as a male-dominated fantasy, and I believe did enjoy it, though it was surprisingly full of long pages of other discussion (‘like all that Kitty and Levin agriculture in Anna Karenina’ as someone said to me). Never looked at it since.

Guy Cuthbertson has featured here on the blog for this book

Peace At Last: A Portrait of Armistice Day, 11 November 1918

An absolutely marvellous look at the end of WW1. I said then ‘a monumental achievement. It contains a huge amount of research, brilliantly put together – I am in awe at the way Guy Cuthbertson managed the material, putting the right things together, and painting such an extraordinary and indelible picture’

And that would apply equally to his new book:

Lady C: The Long Sensational Life of Lady Chatterley’s Lover

 - just published.

He looks at the book in its own right, fascinating litcrit, but he also looks at its impact on, and place in, the world, its legendary part of popular culture. How did it get to be so controversial, so famous, so emblematic? And of course – the book itself demanded to be read again.

Is it a unique book? Its combination of playfulness and joy, the open attitude to sex, lumbering points being pressed home by the author – the thumb on the scales as Martin Amis says. A reader is never in doubt as to whose views are correct, and shared by the author. Sex scenes and frank language that can still surprise today. Some jokes and absurdity that Lawrence intended, and others that seem naïve.

He’s like that chap, your friend, who drones on at social events about some strongly-held views, and you can’t be bothered to argue (boring, or avoiding trouble, or kindness) and so he ends up ‘so I take it you agree with me then?’

Lawerence was mad (in the colloquial sense), and also immensely talented, and also one on his own.

It is very sad that he died in 1930 so soon after publication, so didn’t get to enjoy the controversy and then the sales. Briefly: in the UK the book was banned until a trial in 1960 released it. The trial itself was the best show of the year, and is famously referenced in the Philip Larkin poem Annus Mirabilis. (The new book also looks at censorship and banning in other countries)

Guy explains all this in a riotous, entertaining narrative which is also impeccably researched and referenced. He looks at every aspect of the book: particularly fascinating on the way Lady C entered popular consciousness. Everyone knows who she is, and can snigger with the best of them. He looks at screen adaptations (sent me off to watch some).

There are lovely nuggets such as the perception that people writing Lonely Hearts adverts can use Lady C and Mellors as shorthand for a type they are, or are looking for.

And my own idea – which is that in a Robinson Crusoe post (I too like to consider books’ impact on the world and role in pouar culture – no wonder I loved this book) I quoted a Wilkie Collins character saying that RC is just someone who was always there, a mythic character, we don’t remember when we first heard of him. I don’t suppose the two have often been compared, but I think Lady C is the same.

Guy makes a great point that even today, Lady C is not studied as a set text very much – ‘Lady C had never been killed by becoming a classic classroom text’. This means that unlike almost any other book of its literary stature, there isn’t a long boring phalanx of people online saying ‘I read it at school and it was really boring’, as if that was the final verdict.

Another fascinating explanation – until the book appeared, gamekeepers were held in very low regard, dirty solitary figures who had moved away from the locals they grew up with to become hunters of poachers. Traitors to their class, kowtowing to the gentry. Lawrence changed that with Mellors, so they are seen very differently now. 

 

His use of rsources (as in the Armistice book) is exemplary, and unmatched. Again he has looked at school newsletters, and in this one also finds a reference to 11-plus children mentioning Lady C and the gamekeepers in their exam answers

Slight diversion: Early on in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, we follow Lady C when she and her sister were young and unmarried: they went to Dresden in Germany to study music, and had a free life surrounded by young men. This sounded familiar, and I tracked it down to this book

The Camomile by Catherine Carswell

Where I said:

It tells the story of a young woman who has been studying music in Germany, and has now returned to live in her home town of Glasgow. In some  books there is some passing reference to another time or place, and it makes you think ‘that’s the book I want to read’ – here the years in Frankfurt sound highly dramatic, what with love affairs, starving artistes and dramatic disasters.

And it turns out that Carswell was a close friend of Lawrence, did he perhaps get details of that free and easy life from her? This must be the only outside reference I can add that isn’t in Guy’s book, though Carswell is mentioned – she wrote a biography of Lawrence, and describes how he consulted her on the title, and on how to get it typed up, when one person had refused to continue typing because horrified by the indecent content.

The Australian author Henry Handel Richardson (actually a woman, and best known for the early feminist classic The Getting of Wisdom) also wrote a ponderous novel, the 1908 Maurice Guest, about young people of various nationalities studying music in Germany – this time Leipzig – and having affairs, committing suicide etc. No direct connection that I can see, though Carswell and Lawrence could both have read Maurice Guest. Just how many young people of all nations were gathering in Germany in those days to study music…? Early version of a gap year with Germany standing in for Thailand.

Anyway - this new book is the perfect scholarly work that is also hugely readable and entertaining, informative and thought-provoking. Highly recommended.

And also – it makes you read the original book again. Lady Chatterley’s Lover will have to have its own entry.

File:The English Gamekeeper.jpg - Wikimedia Commons