Lady Chatterley’s Lover Study Guide

D. H. Lawrence was born to working-class parents in the English Midlands, not far from Teversal (the village on which the fictional Tevershall in Lady Chatterley’s Lover is based). Despite his family’s lack of wealth, Lawrence won a scholarship to a prestigious high school, further supplementing his education by reading all of the books in his local library. In his early twenties, Lawrence was mentored by the prominent writer Ford Madox Ford, who introduced Lawrence to many of the most prolific modernist writers of the day. Though initially Lawrence was motivated to write social realist stories about class conflict (like his debut novel, Sons and Lovers), his 1914 elopement with his wife Frieda caused Lawrence to shift towards more explicitly sexual subject matter. The graphic nature of Lawrence’s work made it the subject of much controversy and censorship. In his later years, Lawrence fled his native England for Taos, New Mexico and Florence, Italy, preferring to be anonymous in the face of scandal. Though his work was not critically acclaimed during his lifetime, Lawrence rose to great renown posthumously—until the 1970s, when feminists began to question the gender politics of his work.

The novel begins just after the conclusion of World War I, which lasted from 1914 to 1918 and was the first conflict in which more of the fighting was done via large machines (guns, tanks, and airplanes) than with hand-to-hand combat; the fear of machines replacing men is thus an important theme in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The war, the most devastating event in human history at that point in time, also killed millions and wounded millions more. World War I was especially destructive for England, which had the highest number of casualties of any nation—and which, post-war, began to lose its status as the world’s most powerful state. In the story, therefore, Clifford Chatterley’s wounded body both reflects the widespread reality of personal injury and captures the nation’s more symbolic pain. 

Lawrence—who wrote poetry, memoirs and essays in addition to novels—was inspired by many of his modernist contemporaries, especially his mentor Ford Madox Ford and his close friend Ezra Pound. Lawrence’s willingness to write explicitly sexual prose was also likely inspired by James Joyce, whose novel Ulysses was at the heart of a very famous censorship trial for its own protracted sex scenes. The plot of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was allegedly sparked by E. M. Forster’s then-unpublished novel Maurice, which Lawrence is known to have read. Forster’s novel follows an upper-class man who falls in love with a gamekeeper, a plotline that would later form the backbone (albeit with key details changed) of Lawrence’s narrative.