English Literature books summary

meaningless pursuit of success in his writing and in his obsession with

coal-mining, and towards whom Connie feels a deep physical aversion. A

nurse, Mrs. Bolton, is hired to take care of the handicapped Clifford so

that Connie can be more independent, and Clifford falls into a deep

dependence on the nurse, his manhood fading into an infantile reliance.

Into the void of Connie's life comes Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper

on Clifford's estate, newly returned from serving in the army. Mellors is

aloof and derisive, and yet Connie feels curiously drawn to him by his

innate nobility and grace, his purposeful isolation, his undercurrents of

natural sensuality. After several chance meetings in which Mellors keeps

her at arm's length, reminding her of the class distance between them,

they meet by chance at a hut in the forest, where they have sex. This

happens on several occasions, but still Connie feels a distance between

them, remaining profoundly separate from him despite their physical

closeness.

One day, Connie and Mellors meet by coincidence in the woods, and

they have sex on the forest floor. This time, they experience simultaneous

orgasms. This is a revelatory and profoundly moving experience for Connie;

she begins to adore Mellors, feeling that they have connected on some deep

sensual level. She is proud to believe that she is pregnant with Mellors'

child: he is a real, "living" man, as opposed to the emotionally-dead

intellectuals and the dehumanized industrial workers. They grow

progressively closer, connecting on a primordial physical level, as woman

and man rather than as two minds or intellects.

Connie goes away to Venice for a vacation. While she is gone,

Mellors' old wife returns, causing a scandal. Connie returns to find that

Mellors has been fired as a result of the negative rumors spread about him

by his resentful wife, against whom he has initiated divorce proceedings.

Connie admits to Clifford that she is pregnant with Mellors' baby, but

Clifford refuses to give her a divorce. The novel ends with Mellors working

on a farm, waiting for his divorce, and Connie living with her sister,

also waiting: the hope exists that, in the end, they will be together

Analysis

Valuable Commentory

The greatness of Lady Chatterley's Lover lies in a paradox: it is

simultaneously progressive and reactionary, modern and Victorian. It looks

backwards towards a Victorian stylistic formality, and it seems to

anticipate the social morality of the late 20th century in its frank

engagement with explicit subject matter and profanity. One might say of

the novel that it is formally and thematically conservative, but

methodologically radical.

The easiest of these assertions to prove is that Lady Chatterley's

Lover is "formally conservative." By this I mean that there are few evident

differences between the form of Lady Chatterley's Lover and the form of

the high-Victorian novels written fifty years earlier: in terms of

structure; in terms of narrative voice; in terms of diction, with the

exception of a very few "profane" words. It is important to remember that

Lady Chatterley's Lover was written towards the end of the 1920s, a decade

which had seen extensive literary experimentation. The 1920s opened with

the publishing of the formally radical novel Ulysses, which set the stage

for important technical innovations in literary art: it made extensive use

of the stream-of-consciousness form; it condensed all of its action into a

single 24-hour span; it employed any number of voices and narrative

perspectives. Lady Chatterley's Lover acts in many ways as if the 1920s,

and indeed the entire modernist literary movement, had never happened. The

structure of the novel is conventional, tracing a small group of

characters over an extended period of time in a single place. The rather

preachy narrator usually speaks with the familiar third-person omniscience

of the Victorian novel. And the characters tend towards flatness, towards

representing a type, rather than speaking in their own voices and

developing real three-dimensional personalities.

But surely, if Lady Chatterley's Lover is "formally conservative," it

can hardly be called "thematically conservative"! After all, this is a

novel that raised censorious hackles across the English-speaking world. It

is a novel that liberally employs profanity, that more-or-less graphically-

-graphically, that is, for the 1920s: it is important not to evaluate the

novel by the standards of profanity and graphic sexuality that have become

prevalent at the turn of the 21st century--describes sex and orgasm, and

whose central message is the idea that sexual freedom and sensuality are

far more important, more authentic and meaningful, than the intellectual

life. So what can I mean by calling Lady Chatterley's Lover, a famously

controversial novel, "thematically conservative"?

Well, it is important to remember not only precisely what this novel

seems to advocate, but also the purpose of that advocacy. Lady

Chatterley's Lover is not propaganda for sexual license and free love. As

D.H. Lawrence himself made clear in his essay "A Propos of Lady

Chatterley's Lover," he was no advocate of sex or profanity for their own

sake. The reader should note that the ultimate goal of the novel's

protagonists, Mellors and Connie, is a quite conventional marriage, and a

sex life in which it is clear that Mellors is the aggressor and the

dominant partner, in which Connie plays the receptive part; all who would

argue that Lady Chatterley's Lover is a radical novel would do well to

remember the vilification that the novel heaps upon Mellors' first wife, a

sexually aggressive woman. Rather than mere sexual radicalism, this

novel's chief concern--although it is also concerned, to a far greater

extent than most modernist fiction, with the pitfalls of technology and

the barriers of class--is with what Lawrence understands to be the

inability of the modern self to unite the mind and the body. D.H. Lawrence

believed that without a realization of sex and the body, the mind wanders

aimlessly in the wasteland of modern industrial technology. An important

recognition in Lady Chatterley's Lover is the extent to which the modern

relationship between men and women comes to resemble the relationship

between men and machines.

Not only do men and women require an appreciation of the sexual and

sensual in order to relate to each other properly; they require it even to

live happily in the world, as beings able to maintain human dignity and

individuality in the dehumanizing atmosphere created by modern greed and

the injustices of the class system. As the great writer Lawrence Durrell

observed in reference to Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence was "something

of a puritan himself. He was out to cure, to mend; and the weapons he

selected for this act of therapy were the four-letter words about which so

long and idiotic a battle has raged." That is to say: Lady Chatterley's

Lover was intended as a wake-up call, a call away from the hyper-

intellectualism embraced by so many of the modernists, and towards a

balanced approach in which mind and body are equally valued. It is the

method the novel uses that made the wake-up call so radical--for its time--

and so effective.

This is a novel with high purpose: it points to the degradation of

modern civilization--exemplified in the coal-mining industry and the

soulless and emasculated Clifford Chatterley--and it suggests an

alternative in learning to appreciate sensuality. And it is a novel, one

must admit, which does not quite succeed. Certainly, it is hardly the

equal of D.H. Lawrence's great novels, Women in Love and The Rainbow. It

attempts a profound comment on the decline of civilization, but it fails

as a novel when its social goal eclipses its novelistic goals, when the

characters become mere allegorical types: Mellors as the Noble Savage,

Clifford as the impotent nobleman. And the novel tends also to dip into a

kind of breathless incoherence at moments of extreme sensuality or

emotional weight. It is not a perfect novel, but it is a novel which has

had a profound impact on the way that 20th-century writers have written

about sex, and about the deeper relationships of which, thanks in part to

Lawrence, sex can no longer be ignored as a crucial element. Characters

Lady Chatterley - The protagonist of the novel. Before her marriage, she

is simply Constance Reid, an intellectual and social progressive, the

daughter of Sir Malcolm and the sister of Hilda. When she marries Clifford

Chatterley, a minor nobleman, Constance--or, as she is known throughout

the novel, Connie--assumes his title, becoming Lady Chatterley. Lady

Chatterley's Lover chronicles Connie's maturation as a woman and as a

sensual being. She comes to despise her weak, ineffectual husband, and to

love Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on her husband's estate. In the

process of leaving her husband and conceiving a child with Mellors, Lady

Chatterley moves from the heartless, bloodless world of the intelligentsia

and aristocracy into a vital and profound connection rooted in sensuality

and sexual fulfillment.

Oliver Mellors - The lover in the novel's title. Mellors is the

gamekeeper on Clifford Chatterley's estate, Wragby. He is aloof,

sarcastic, intelligent and noble. He was born near Wragby, and worked as a

blacksmith until he ran off to the army to escape an unhappy marriage. In

the army he rose to become a commissioned lieutenant--an unusual position

for a member of the working classes--but was forced to leave the army

because of a case of pneumonia, which left him in poor health.

Disappointed by a string of unfulfilling love affairs, Mellors lives in

quiet isolation, from which he is redeemed by his relationship with

Connie: the passion unleashed by their lovemaking forges a profound bond

between them. At the end of the novel, Mellors is fired from his job as

gamekeeper and works as a laborer on a farm, waiting for a divorce from

his old wife so he can marry Connie. Mellors is the representative in this

novel of the Noble Savage: he is a man with an innate nobility but who

remains impervious to the pettiness and emptiness of conventional society,

with access to a primitive flame of passion and sensuality.

Clifford Chatterley - Connie's husband. Clifford Chatterley is a minor

nobleman who becomes paralyzed from the waist down during World War I. As

a result of his injury, Clifford is impotent. He retires to his familial

estate, Wragby, where he becomes first a successful writer, and then a

powerful businessman. But the gap between Connie and him grows ever wider;

obsessed with financial success and fame, he is not truly interested in

love, and she feels that he has become passionless and empty. He turns for

solace to his nurse and companion, Mrs. Bolton, who worships him as a

nobleman even as she despises him for his casual arrogance. Clifford

represents everything that this novel despises about the modern English

nobleman: he is a weak, vain man, but declares his right to rule the lower

classes, and he soullessly pursues money and fame through industry and the

meaningless manipulation of words. His impotence is symbolic of his

failings as a strong, sensual man.

Mrs. Bolton - Ivy Bolton is Clifford's nurse and caretaker. She is a

competent, complex, still-attractive middle-aged woman. Years before the

action in this novel, her husband died in an accident in the mines owned by

Clifford's family. Even as Mrs. Bolton resents Clifford as the owner of

the mines--and, in a sense, the murderer of her husband--she still

maintains a worshipful attitude towards him as the representative of the

upper class. Her relationship with Clifford--she simultaneously adores and

despises him, while he depends and looks down on her--is probably the most

fascinating and complex relationship in the novel.

Michaelis - A successful Irish playwright with whom Connie has an affair

early in the novel. Michaelis asks Connie to marry him, but she decides

not to, realizing that he is like all other intellectuals: a slave to

success, a purveyor of vain ideas and empty words, passionless.

Hilda Reid - Connie's older sister by two years, the daughter of Sir

Malcolm. Hilda shared Connie's cultured upbringing and intellectual

education. She remains unliberated by the raw sensuality that changed

Connie's life. She disdains Connie's lover, Mellors, as a member of the

lower classes, but in the end she helps Connie to leave Clifford.

Sir Malcolm Reid - The father of Connie and Hilda. He is an acclaimed

painter, an aesthete and unabashed sensualist who despises Clifford for his

weakness and impotence, and who immediately warms to Mellors.

Tommy Dukes - One of Clifford's contemporaries, Tommy Dukes is a

brigadier general in the British Army and a clever and progressive

intellectual. Lawrence intimates, however, that Dukes is a representative

of all intellectuals: all talk and no action. Dukes speaks of the

importance of sensuality, but he himself is incapable of sensuality and

uninterested in sex.

Charles May, Hammond, Berry - Young intellectuals who visit Wragby, and

who, along with Tommy Dukes and Clifford, participate in the socially

progressive but ultimately meaningless discussions about love and sex.

Duncan Forbes - An artist friend of Connie and Hilda. Forbes paints

abstract canvases, a form of art both Mellors and D.H. Lawrence seem to

despise. He once loved Connie, and Connie originally claims to be pregnant

with his child.

Bertha Coutts - Although Bertha never actually appears in the novel, her

presence is felt. She is Mellors' wife, separated from him but not

divorced. Their marriage faltered because of their sexual incompatibility:

she was too rapacious, not tender enough. She returns at the end of the

novel to spread rumors about Mellors' infidelity to her, and helps get him

fired from his position as gamekeeper. As the novel concludes, Mellors is

in the process of divorcing her.

Squire Winter - A relative of Clifford. He is a firm believer in the old

privileges of the aristocracy.

Daniele, Giovanni - Venetian gondoliers in the service of Hilda and

Connie. Giovanni hopes that the women will pay him to sleep with them; he

is disappointed. Daniele reminds Connie of Mellors: he is attractive, a

"real man." Context

Lord of the Flies by W.Golding

William Gerald Golding was born in September of 1911 in the city of

Cornwall, England. Growing up in the life of luxury, Golding soon realized

that he was very talented at his school studies. He attended both the

prestigious colleges of Malboro and Oxford, studying both natural science

and English. Despite his father’s protests, Golding eventually decided to

devote his career to literature, where he became one of the most famous

English novelists ever. Soon World War II started, compelling Golding to

enlist in the Navy. It was war where Golding lost the idea that men are

inherently good. After witnessing the evil of war, both from men of the

enemy and his own side, Golding lost the belief that humans have an

innocent nature. Even children he learned are inherently evil, thus

foreshadowing his future and most famous novel, Lord of the Flies. In later

years, Golding received many noteworthy awards for his contribution to

English and world literature. Finally in 1983, he was awarded the Nobel

prize for his literary merits. Golding’s other interests include Greek

literature, music and history. Yet William G. Golding will be remembered

mostly for his great contributions to modern literature.

Chapter One: The Sound of the Shell:

The novel begins in the aftermath of a plane crash in the Pacific

Ocean during an unnamed war in which a group of English schoolboys are

isolated on what they assume to be an island under no adult supervision.

The pilot died in the crash and the plane has been swept to sea by a storm.

Among the survivors are a young, fair-haired boy of twelve named Ralph and

a pudgy boy referred to only by the derisive nickname from school that he

dislikes: Piggy. Piggy insists that he can neither run nor swim well

because of his asthma. Ralph insists that his father, a commander in the

Navy, will come and rescue them. Both of Piggy's parents had already died.

Piggy doubts that anybody will find them, and suggests that the boys should

gather together. Ralph finds a conch shell, which Piggy tells him will make

a loud noise. When Ralph blows the conch, several children make their way

to Ralph and Piggy. There were several small children around six years old

and a party of boys marching in step, dressed in eccentric clothing: black

cloaks and black caps. One of the boys, Jack Merridew, leads the group,

which he addresses as his choir. Piggy suggests that everyone state their

names, and Jack insists on being called Merridew, for Jack is a kid's name.

Jack, a tall thin boy with an ugly, freckled complexion and flaming red

hair, insists that he be the leader because he's the head boy of his choir.

They decide to vote for chief: although Jack seems the most obvious leader

and Piggy the most obviously intelligent, Ralph has a sense of stillness

and gravity. He is elected chief, but concedes that Jack can lead his

choir, who will be hunters. Ralph decides that everyone should stay there

while three boys will find out whether they are on an island. Ralph chooses

one of the boys, Simon, while Jack insists that he comes along. When Piggy

offers to go, Jack dismisses the idea, humiliating Piggy, who is still

ashamed that Ralph revealed his hated nickname. The three boys search the

island, climbing up the mountain to survey it. On the way up, they push

down the mountain a large rock that blocks their way. When they finally

reach the top and determine that they are on an island, Ralph looks upon

everything and says "this belongs to us." The three decide that they need

food to eat, and find a piglet caught in a curtain of creepers. Jack draws

his knife, but pauses before he has a chance to stab the pig, which frees

itself and runs away. Jack could not stab the pig because of the great

violence involved, but he vows that he would show no mercy next time.

Chapter Two: Fire on the Mountain:

Ralph called another meeting that night. The sunburned children had

put on clothing once more, while the choir was more disheveled, having

abandoned their cloaks. Ralph announces that they are on an uninhabited

island, but Jack interjects and insists that they need an army to hunt the

pigs. Ralph sets the rules of order for the meeting: only the person who

has the conch shell may speak. Jack relishes having rules, and even more

so, having punishment for breaking them. Piggy reprimands Jack. He says

that nobody knows where they are and that they may be there a long time.

Ralph reassures them, telling them that the island is theirs, and until the

grown-ups come they will have fun. A small boy is about to cry; he wonders

what they will do about a snake-thing. Ralph suggests that they build a

fire on the top of the mountain, for the smoke will signal their presence.

Jack summons the boys to come build a fire, leaving only Piggy and Ralph.

Piggy shows disgust at their childish behavior as Ralph catches up and

helps them bring piles of wood to the top.

Eventually it proves too difficult for some of the smaller boys, who

lose interest and search for fruit to eat. When they gather enough wood,

Ralph and Jack wonder how to start a fire. Piggy arrives, and Jack suggests

that they use his glasses. Jack snatches them from Piggy, who can barely

see without them. Eventually they use the glasses to reflect the rays of

the sun, starting a fire. The boys are mesmerized by the fire, but it soon

burns out. Ralph insists that they have rules, and Jack agrees, since they

are English, and the English are the best at everything so must do the

right things. Ralph says they might never be saved, and Piggy claims that

he has been saying that, but nobody has listened. They get the fire going

once more. While Piggy has the conch, he loses his temper, telling the

other boys how they should have listened to his orders to build shelters

first and how a fire is a secondary consideration. Piggy worries that they

still don't know exactly how many boys there are, and mentions the snakes.

Suddenly, one of the trees catches on fire, and one of the boy screams

about snakes. Piggy thinks that one of the boys is missing.

Chapter Three: Huts on the Beach:

Jack scans the oppressively silent forest. A bird startles him as he

progresses along the trail. He raises his spear and hurls it at a group of

pigs, driving them away. He eventually comes upon Ralph near the lagoon.

Ralph complains that the boys are not working hard to build the shelters.

The little ones are hopeless, spending most of their time bathing or

eating. Jack says that Ralph is chief, so he should just order them to do

so. Ralph admits that they could call a meeting, vow to build something,

whether a hut or a submarine, start building it for five minutes then quit.

Ralph tells Jack that most of his hunters spent the afternoon swimming. A

madness comes to Ralph's eyes as he admits that he might kill something

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