LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 1

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• Author: D·H·Lawrence

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
    The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little
    habitats, to have new little hopes. 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.

    This was more or less Constance Chatterley's position. The war had brought the roof down
    over her head. And she had realized that one must live and learn.

   

She married Clifford Chatterley in 1917, when he was home for a month on leave. They
    had a month's honeymoon. Then he went back to Flanders: to be shipped over to England
    again six months later, more or less in bits. Constance, his wife, was then twenty-three
    years old, and he was twenty-nine.

   

His hold on life was marvellous. He didn't die, and the bits seemed to grow together
    again. For two years he remained in the doctor's hands. Then he was pronounced a cure, and
    could return to life again, with the lower half of his body, from the hips down, paralysed
    for ever.

   

This was in 1920. They returned, Clifford and Constance, to his home, Wragby Hall, the
    family `seat'. His father had died, Clifford was now a baronet, Sir Clifford, and
    Constance was Lady Chatterley. They came to start housekeeping and married life in the
    rather forlorn home of the Chatterleys on a rather inadequate income. Clifford had a
    sister, but she had departed. Otherwise there were no near relatives. The elder brother
    was dead in the war. Crippled for ever, knowing he could never have any children, Clifford
    came home to the smoky Midlands to keep the Chatterley name alive while he could.

   

He was not really downcast. He could wheel himself about in a wheeled chair, and he had
    a bath-chair with a small motor attachment, so he could drive himself slowly round the
    garden and into the line melancholy park, of which he was really so proud, though he
    pretended to be flippant about it.

   

Having suffered so much, the capacity for suffering had to some extent left him. He
    remained strange and bright and cheerful, almost, one might say, chirpy, with his ruddy,
    healthy-looking face, arid his pale-blue, challenging bright eyes. His shoulders were
    broad and strong, his hands were very strong. He was expensively dressed, and wore
    handsome neckties from Bond Street. Yet still in his face one saw the watchful look, the
    slight vacancy of a cripple.

   

He had so very nearly lost his life, that what remained was wonderfully precious to
    him. It was obvious in the anxious brightness of his eyes, how proud he was, after the
    great shock, of being alive. But he had been so much hurt that something inside him had
    perished, some of his feelings had gone. There was a blank of insentience.

   

Constance, his wife, was a ruddy, country-looking girl with soft brown hair and sturdy
    body, and slow movements, full of unusual energy. She had big, wondering eyes, and a soft
    mild voice, and seemed just to have come from her native village. It was not so at all.
    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 two girls, therefore, were from an early age not the least daunted by either art or
    ideal politics. It was their natural atmosphere. They were at once cosmopolitan and
    provincial, with the cosmopolitan provincialism of art that goes with pure social ideals.

   

They had been sent to Dresden at the age of fifteen, for music among other things. And
    they had had a good time there. They lived freely among the students, they argued with the
    men over philosophical, sociological and artistic matters, they were just as good as the
    men themselves: only better, since they were women. And they tramped off to the forests
    with sturdy youths bearing guitars, twang-twang! They sang the Wandervogel songs, and they
    were free. Free! That was the great word. Out in the open world, out in the forests of the
    morning, with lusty and splendid-throated young fellows, free to do as they liked,
    and---above all---to say what they liked. It was the talk that mattered supremely: the
    impassioned interchange of talk. Love was only a minor accompaniment.

   

Both Hilda and Constance had had their tentative love-affairs by the time they were
    eighteen. The young men with whom they talked so passionately and sang so lustily and
    camped under the trees in such freedom wanted, of course, the love connexion. The girls
    were doubtful, but then the thing was so much talked about, it was supposed to be so
    important. And the men were so humble and craving. Why couldn't a girl be queenly, and
    give the gift of herself?

   

So they had given the gift of themselves, each to the youth with whom she had the most
    subtle and intimate arguments. The arguments, the discussions were the great thing: the
    love-making and connexion were only a sort of primitive reversion and a bit of an
    anti-climax. One was less in love with the boy afterwards, and a little inclined to hate
    him, as if he had trespassed on one's privacy and inner freedom. For, of course, being a
    girl, one's whole dignity and meaning in life consisted in the achievement of an absolute,
    a perfect, a pure and noble freedom. What else did a girl's life mean? To shake off the
    old and sordid connexions and subjections.

   

And however one might sentimentalize it, this sex business was one of the most ancient,
    sordid connexions and subjections. Poets who glorified it were mostly men. Women had
    always known there was something better, something higher. And now they knew it more
    definitely than ever. The beautiful pure freedom of a woman was infinitely more wonderful
    than any sexual love. The only unfortunate thing was that men lagged so far behind women
    in the matter. They insisted on the sex thing like dogs.

   

And a woman had to yield. A man was like a child with his appetites. A woman had to
    yield him what he wanted, or like a child he would probably turn nasty and flounce away
    and spoil what was a very pleasant connexion. But a woman could yield to a man without
    yielding her inner, free self. That the poets and talkers about sex did not seem to have
    taken sufficiently into account. A woman could take a man without really giving herself
    away. Certainly she could take him without giving herself into his power. Rather she could
    use this sex thing to have power over him. For she only had to hold herself back in sexual
    intercourse, and let him finish and expend himself without herself coming to the crisis:
    and then she could prolong the connexion and achieve her orgasm and her crisis while he
    was merely her tool.

   

Both sisters had had their love experience by the time the war came, and they were
    hurried home. Neither was ever in love with a young man unless he and she were verbally
    very near: that is unless they were profoundly interested, TALKING to one another. The
    amazing, the profound, the unbelievable thrill there was in passionately talking to some
    really clever young man by the hour, resuming day after day for months...this they had
    never realized till it happened! The paradisal promise: Thou shalt have men to talk
    to!---had never been uttered. It was fulfilled before they knew what a promise it was.

   

And if after the roused intimacy of these vivid and soul-enlightened discussions the
    sex thing became more or less inevitable, then let it. It marked the end of a chapter. It
    had a thrill of its own too: a queer vibrating thrill inside the body, a final spasm of
    self-assertion, like the last word, exciting, and very like the row of asterisks that can
    be put to show the end of a paragraph, and a break in the theme.

   

When the girls came home for the summer holidays of 1913, when Hilda was twenty and
    Connie eighteen, their father could see plainly that they had had the love experience.

   

L'amour avait poss

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1. Ebooks list page : 86
2. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 10
3. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 17
4. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 14
5. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 6
6. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 11
7. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 2
8. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 9
9. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 3
10. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 8
11. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 7
12. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 5
13. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 4
14. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 13
15. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 16
16. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 19