In the opening paragraph of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the narrator immediately sets the tone for the challenges that lie ahead, foreshadowing the idea that the journey the novel takes will not be a simple one:
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.
Although it’s clearly a wry understatement, the phrase "it is rather hard work" establishes an immediate acknowledgment of the effort required for anyone to navigate life in the late 1910s. The world's entire population was living through the aftermath of the largest and most devastating war in recorded history, not to mention a flu pandemic that killed more people than the conflict did. The absence of a "smooth road into the future" alludes to more than the personal and relational hurdles the characters will face. While it is undeniable that the road Connie, Clifford and Mellors will face is full of obstacles, this passage’s field of reference is broader than that. Right at the beginning of this book, Lawrence acknowledges that the early 20th century was an age with countless new challenges for everyone.
The imagery of going "round" or scrambling "over the obstacles" in this quotation paints a picture of a landscape beset by these hurdles. It evokes both the winding and circuitous country roads of rural England, and the dangerous terrain of No Man’s Land in the theaters of war. It also gestures to the new social landscape of the United Kingdom and its colonies, in which individuals from different backgrounds and classes suddenly interacted far more in everyday life than they ever had.
The final line of the passage tints its ominous message with a sense of determination and resilience. Lawrence’s choice to open the book in this way also foreshadows Oliver Mellors’s cautious hope about the future in his final letter to Connie, who also notes that it’s imperative to keep on living no matter what comes about.
As he introduces Constance, the novel’s female protagonist, Lawrence paints a vivid portrait of her upbringing and background through a series of allusions. These references locate her within a specific historical and cultural niche. They also set the stage for the many contradictions in her character that will guide the trajectory of Lady Chatterley’s Lover:
Her father was the once well-known R.A., old Sir Malcolm Reid. Her mother had been one of the cultivated Fabians in the palmy, rather pre-Raphaelite days. Between artists and cultured socialists, Constance and her sister Hilda had had what might be called an aesthetically unconventional upbringing. They had been taken to Paris and Florence and Rome to breathe in art, and they had been taken also in the other direction, to the Hague and Berlin, to great Socialist conventions, where the speakers spoke in every civilized tongue, and no one was abashed.
The Royal Academy of Art is Britain’s most longstanding and prestigious artistic institution. By saying Connie’s father was a “once well-known” member, Lawrence immediately situates their family within a realm of respectable, recognized artistic achievement. The allusions that follow—to the "cultivated Fabians" and the "pre-Raphaelite" society her mother belonged to—refer to an important period of intellectual and artistic revolution in Britain, which began in the 1880s. The Fabian Society was a group that advocated for socialist ideals. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was an art movement that rejected previously strict academic standards and celebrated detailed, naturalistic art. An association with these two groups suggests that her parents were well-connected, well-known, and somewhat bohemian. These allusions help explain her “somewhat aesthetically unusual upbringing.”
Connie's exposure to both the world of art (through visits to Paris, Florence, and Rome) and politics (via the Socialist conventions she attends in The Hague and Berlin) suggest that she’s been given every opportunity to see the changes happening in early-20th-century Europe and to learn from them. She’s still the daughter of an English aristocrat, however, and so her intellectual modernity is necessarily in conflict with the traditional expectations for women of this class. Through these allusions, Lawrence demonstrates that Connie is both an "ancient type" and a "modern woman." These are qualities that initially attract the staunchly English and conservative Clifford Chatterley to her and then, later, distance him from her.
