What is the plot of Lady Chatterley's Lover?

Answer 1

The novel opens by taking the reader through the upbringing of Connie Reid and her sister Hilda as upper-middle class girls in early 1900s England. They are raised as cultured, independent thinkers, free to exercise their intellectual and sexual pursuits in their teen years. Then Connie marries Sir Clifford, becoming Lady Chatterley, in 1917. However, he is sent to serve in The Great War after a short honeymoon and returns paralyzed from waist down and now impotent. The couple returns to Wragby Hall after the war, a dismal mansion in a coaling town. Here, Clifford focuses on his writing career by writing short stories, using Connie to discuss his ideas with. As he gains success, intellectuals come to the home of the Chatterley's to have long discussions on the affairs of the day and issues of life. But Connie is dissatisfied with the isolated, dreary life at Wragby and attempts to soothe her restfulness with an affair with a visiting playwright, Michaelis. But Michaelis can not satisfy her and she soon tires of him and rejects his offer of marriage. However, the affair does awaken Connie's physical desires that she had previously kept silent and it creates a growing aversion to Clifford and his impotent world of meaningless words. Thus, Connie hires a nurse, Mrs. Bolton, to take care of Clifford so that she does not have to anymore. At the same time, Oliver Mellors returns to be gamekeeper on the estate after being in the army. Connie is peculiarly attracted him in his graceful isolation though he remains strangely aloof and derisive. At their first meetings at a hut in the woods, Mellors remains cold and distant. But eventually the sensual undercurrent becomes too strong and the two become regular lovers, completely enamored by each other. Mellors excites Connie in a way no other man could and they become connected by an unexplainable physical fulfillment. But when Connie goes on vacation to Venice with her sister, Mellor's bitter, angry wife returns to him, demanding he take her back. When he does not, she creates a public scandal and spreads terrible rumors about Mellors, resulting in his dismissal. Connie returns to Clifford with full intentions of divorcing him and admits to him that she is pregnant with Mellor's child. But the resentful Clifford refuses to give her the divorce. The novel ends with Mellors working on a farm to raise money for a new life with Connie and both characters waiting and hoping that their divorces will be finalized so that they can marry.