D. H. Lawrence - Lady Chatterley's Lover

I did not always love D. H. Lawrence. I remember reading one of his lesser novels - The Rainbow, maybe - as a teenager and finding it dreadfully boring. Where were the vampires and werewolves! I should have read Lady Chatterley's Lover instead, because - although no supernatural creatures - this one has a really good romance in it.

To me it is the perfect love story because it's symbolic of class struggle. Sorry, I know that's not what most people want of their love stories. So, fine. There's smut - quite a bit of it. Very well written, too. Having read some ghastly sex scenes in "BookTok books", I do think it takes skill to describe sex. You need specifics, but you can't do it mechanically or you won't capture the drugged atmosphere of sex.

But of course what does it for me is class rage! Which the titular lover, the gamekeeper Oliver Mellors, delivers in spades. Mellors comes from a working-class background, but was educated and bred well enough that he could have enjoyed some social mobility - had he cared to. Although he could speak "proper" (RP) English he often lapses into Derbyshire vernacular just to piss off his betters - typically his employers, Lord and Lady Chatterley.

When he and Connie Chatterley start their affair, they are almost hostile to one another despite their attraction. She hates that he speaks Derby to her - finds it downright rude - he hates to be entangled with a woman. After several trysts they warm to each other and it does get quite romantic. I loved the part where Connie talks Derby to him, too - and the part where they had a mock wedding for their genitals, "John Thomas" and "Lady Jane". 

Often Mellors is contrasted against Connie's real husband, Clifford Chatterley - impotent, crippled from the war, yet lordly and imperious. 

At first Clifford is a successful writer, representing the effete, hateful, circle-jerking yet intensely bitchy world of literary society - so you think Mellors stands for the masculine working class. But over time Clifford also becomes heavily involved in the pits and the factories - but he somehow becomes even more despicable. Here's Mellors:

Though it's a shame, what's been done to people these last hundred years: men turned into nothing but labour-insects, and all their manhood taken away, and all their real life. I'd wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake.

And also: 

I can’t stand the twaddling bossy impudence of the people who run this world. That’s why I can’t get on. I hate the impudence of money, and I hate the impudence of class.  

By now it's obvious Mellors is a stand-in for Lawrence, given his outbursts of philosophy. And this rebellious attitude gives extra poignancy to the ending of the story, a letter from Mellors to Connie saying he can't wait for "John Thomas" and "Lady Jane" to meet again. More than just cutesy/obscene nicknames - they're alter-egos free from the world of pretensions, class, and constraints they live in.