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Informationen zum Autor D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE (1885–1930), the prolific novelist, poet, and travel writer, was born in Nottinghamshire, England.His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1911, and the next year he published Sons and Lovers . His masterpieces The Rainbow and Women in Love were completed in quick succession, but the first was suppressed as indecent and the second was not published until 1920. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was published in 1928, but it was banned in England and the United States for indecency. He died of tuberculosis in 1930 in Venice. JOHN SUTHERLAND is a British academic, newspaper columnist, and author. He is Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London. He has twice served as a judge for the Booker Prize and writes regularly for The Guardian. Klappentext Constance Chatterley is possessed of a certain vitality, yet she is deeply unhappy in her marriage to an invalid. She finds refuge in the arms of Mellors the game-keeper. Together they move from an outer world of chaos towards an inner world of fulfillment. Leseprobe From the Introduction by John Sutherland Novels that manifestly change society rarely happen. Two have, incontrovertibly, altered worldview and, one can plausibly claim, the world itself. Both had something of the unexploded bomb about them. Nineteen Eighty-Four came out in 1949. It was initially seen as another H. G. Wells-style dystopia. Its sales were moderate. It was not until the 1954 BBC-TV version that the seriousness of what Orwell was saying hit home and readers, en masse , turned to the novel, realising that Nineteen Eighty-Four was not pulp science fiction but a tract for its times and for ous. Lady Chatterley’s Lover , was regarded as an ‘obscene publication’ when it came out in 1928 and was prosecuted and legally suppressed as filth in Britain and America for three decades. But pornography as Lawrence insisted is precisely what his novel was not. Its instruction to humanity was opposite. ‘Sex in the head’ (pornography) should, Lawrence believed, be replaced by fulfilling love as an exchange of whole bodies in a spirit of mutual reverence. It's a tall order. At the 1960 UK trial which, finally, ‘acquitted Lady Chat’, with momentous consequence for literary freedoms, the Bishop of Woolwich (John Robinson) testified, as an expert witness under oath, that the seven acts of love described in Lady Chatterley’s Lover ‘were acts of holy communion’. The prelate’s claim was mocked but had Lawrence been at the Old Bailey that day he would have nodded approval. Both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Lady Chatterley’s Lover were written by novelists with little time left to make their point. Both were in advanced stages of tuberculosis---‘the poet’s disease’. They knew the end was near every time they coughed blood. The myth, associated with John Keats, is that TB (in Keats’s day called ‘consumption’) heightens literary genius. It certainly instils urgency. Orwell, by the time his novel was published, had seven months to live. Lawrence had eighteen months after Lady Chatterley’s Lover saw print (it had taken him three years to write). They had Cassandra’s brief moment with the hope that unlike Troy’s seer they would be taken notice of. The novels, to make a final point of comparison, are radically different. Orwell was a political thinker; Lawrence a quasi-religious prophet. But they breathe the same in articulo mortis, point of death, hurry-up. One feels it in the barking sentences and chipped sententiae of Lady Chatterley’s Lover . At times Lawrence virtually shouts from the page. The overall tone of the novel is declarative: it admits no contradiction from the first sentence, ‘Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we ref...
