The Censorship Of The American Society In The 1800s

A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title: Lady Chatterley's Lover

Author: D H Lawrence

eBook No.: 0100181.txt

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Language: English

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Date first posted: November 2001

Date most recently updated: November 2001

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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title: Lady Chatterley's Lover

Author: D H Lawrence

Chapter 1

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.

The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build

up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard

work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or

scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many

skies have fallen.

This was more or less Constance Chatterley's position. The war had

brought the roof down over her head. And she had realized that one must

live and learn.

She married Clifford Chatterley in 1917, when he was home for a month

on leave. They had a month's honeymoon. Then he went back to Flanders:

to be shipped over to England again six months later, more or less in

bits. Constance, his wife, was then twenty-three years old, and he was

twenty-nine.

His hold on life was marvellous. He didn't die, and the bits seemed to

grow together again. For two years he remained in the doctor's hands.

Then he was pronounced a cure, and could return to life again, with the

lower half of his body, from the hips down, paralysed for ever.

This was in 1920. They returned, Clifford and Constance, to his home,

Wragby Hall, the family 'seat'. His father had died, Clifford was now a

baronet, Sir Clifford, and Constance was Lady Chatterley. They came to

start housekeeping and married life in the rather forlorn home of the

Chatterleys on a rather inadequate income. Clifford had a sister, but

she had departed. Otherwise there were no near relatives. The elder

brother was dead in the war. Crippled for ever, knowing he could never

have any children, Clifford came home to the smoky Midlands to keep the

Chatterley name alive while he could.

He was not really downcast. He could wheel himself about in a wheeled

chair, and he had a bath-chair with a small motor attachment, so he

could drive himself slowly round the garden and into the line

melancholy park, of which he was really so proud, though he pretended

to be flippant about it.

Having suffered so much, the capacity for suffering had to some extent

left him. He remained strange and bright and cheerful, almost, one

might say, chirpy, with his ruddy, healthy-looking face, arid his

pale-blue, challenging bright eyes. His shoulders were broad and

strong, his hands were very strong. He was expensively dressed, and

wore handsome neckties from Bond Street. Yet still in his face one saw

the watchful look, the slight vacancy of a cripple.

He had so very nearly lost his life, that what remained was wonderfully

precious to him. It was obvious in the anxious brightness of his eyes,

how proud he was, after the great shock, of being alive. But he had

been so