"Lady Chatterley's Lover" (1928) by D. H. Lawrence

I was recommended D. H. Lawrence, so I went to a bookshop and picked up "Lady Chatterley's Lover", completely oblivious of its 1) history; 2) content and; 3) reputation. I read on without any expectation and ten pages in, whoa, mamma mia. Let's get this out of the way first - in the days of the Internet and Netflix, none of what caused this book to go through the 1960 obscenity trial is legitimately pornographic. If titillation is your sheer purpose of reading it, look elsewhere and, honestly, get out more. I read the book in two sittings over the stretch of a year and my feelings of the work evolved over time. On first reading, it feels like Lawrence is making a powerful case of modern day feminism, where a woman should be independent, strong and have total control over her body and fate to escape the confines of social class - bear in mind this work was written at the heights of the suffragettes movement - then the discourse overshoots. You know that old saying about women use sex to get love and men use love to get sex? As the adulterous pair develops, the reader discovers that the woman is now obsessed with bodily interaction and the man looks for more soul in the relationship. The woman suddenly becomes so insatiable, bigoted, unreasonable, and needs the (body of) the man so much it completely tips the gender balance over. Considering the biography of the author himself, one cannot help but find the ending farcical and serves nothing but to gratify himself and, by doing so, destroy all the goodwill set up in the preceding three hundred-odd pages when, ultimately, the entire work is just one man demonstrating masculine superiority over another by announcing his victory over one woman's body and soul. The language and the psychological writing are admirable though.