Actress Joely Richardson played Lady Chatterley in the 1993 television mini-series of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Almost thirty years on and she will appear as the carer/nurse of crippled Clifford Chatterley in the film version released late in 2022. The lead role goes to Emma Corin (she played Princess Diana in the television series The Crown).
That’s how time works, unsentimentally and generationally consigning actors who once played Hamlet to the role of Polonius in a matter of decades. Or as D H Lawrence put it in the story:
Time in her flight drops these fine old feathers.
Time has played a big part in the story of D H Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Between 1928 and 1960, it was deemed too racy for publication. Now, we have Fifty Shades of Grey, and its sequels, making Lady Chatterley seem quite reserved by comparison.
But there is more to Lady Chatterley’s Lover than steamy scenes of passion. It’s a story about class divisions, the conditions of the working classes and the arrogance of the aristocracy; in particular the struggling coal miners pitted against the wealthy owners of the coal mines.
Sir Clifford Chatterley tells his wife:
The masses have been ruled since time began, and till time ends, ruled they will have to be. It is sheer hypocrisy and farce to say they can rule themselves.
And Lady Chatterley wonders what her wealthy godfather Squire Winter would think of her affair with a gamekeeper if he knew about it. She muses:
He would detest and despise her for he had come almost to hate the shoving forward of the working classes. A man of her own class he would not mind…
