Editing Lady Chatterley's Lover (section)

=== Class ===
''Lady Chatterley's Lover'' also presents some views on the early-20th-century British social context. That is most evidently seen in the plot on the affair of an aristocratic woman (Connie) with a working-class man (Mellors). That is heightened when Mellors adopts the local broad Derbyshire dialect, something he can slip into and out of. The critic and writer [[Mark Schorer]] writes of the forbidden love of a woman of relatively superior social situation who is drawn to an "outsider", a man of a lower social rank or a foreigner. He considers that to be a familiar construction in Lawrence's works in which the woman either resists her impulse or yields to it.<ref>{{Citation | last = Schorer | first = Mark | contribution = Introduction | title = Lady Chatterley's Lover | place = New York | publisher = Grover Press | year = 1993 | page = 17}}.</ref> Schorer believes that the two possibilities were embodied, respectively, in the situation into which Lawrence was born and that into which Lawrence married, which becomes a favourite topic in his work.

There is a clear class divide between the inhabitants of Wragby and Tevershall that is bridged by the nurse Mrs Bolton. Clifford is more self assured in his position, but Connie is often thrown when the villagers treat her as a Lady like when she has tea in the village. This is often made explicit in the narration such as here:

{{blockquote|Clifford Chatterley was more upper class than Connie. Connie was well-to-do intelligentsia, but he was aristocracy. Not the big sort, but still ''it''. His father was a baronet, and his mother had been a viscount's daughter.{{Sfn | Lawrence | 2003 | p = 5}}}}

There are also signs of dissatisfaction and resentment from the Tevershall coal pit colliers, whose fortunes are in decline, against Clifford, who owns the mines. Involved with hard, dangerous and health-threatening employment, the unionised and self-supporting pit-village communities in Britain have been home to more pervasive class barriers than has been the case in other industries (for an example, see chapter 2 of ''[[The Road to Wigan Pier]]'' by [[George Orwell]].) They were also centres of widespread [[Nonconformist (Protestantism)|Nonconformism]] (Non-Anglican Protestantism), which hold proscriptive views on sexual sins such as adultery. References to the concepts of [[anarchism]], [[socialism]], [[communism]] and [[capitalism]] permeate the book. [[Strike action|Union strikes]] were also a constant preoccupation in Wragby Hall.

Coal mining is a recurrent and familiar theme in Lawrence's life and writing because of his background, and it is prominent also in ''[[Sons and Lovers]]'' and ''[[Women in Love]]'' and short stories such as ''[[Odour of Chrysanthemums]]''.