The other day I took a drive over to Toby Pond and looked in at the house where I’d spent six months during the Covid lockdown. My favorite room there was a little library. It has two steep book-lined walls and high windows that give plenty of light for reading. With nothing better to do, I pulled down Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Having read it many years ago, I had failed to appreciate it. This time it bowled me over. Here’s a small excerpt, which offers a taste of one of the novel’s major themes.
The “bone-bringers” is a reference to the industrialists and financiers of the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries, tycoons like Rockefeller and Ford, bankers like Rothschild and J.P. Morgan, for whom Lawrence had nothing but contempt. It wouldn’t be a stretch to think of the bone-bringers now as our not-so-silent 21st-century, showier-than-thou, cyberworld titans like Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and their ilk.
And this is the room where I pulled the book off the shelf.
beautiful room for reading. Lawrence had a tough mind and gripping style.
thx, Howard. you’re so right on both counts.
My high school French teacher told us that the original working title of “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” was “La Tendresse.” True or not?
Yes, Lawrence had several titles for it, and “Tenderness” was one of them. The literary scholar Mark Schorer has written that Lady Chatterly’s Lover “was first to be called Tenderness.”