…and more about Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
The nurse who comes to live at Wragby is called Mrs. Bolton. She’s the one who brings new life energy to Clifford.
There’s a scene in this book that I couldn’t understand when I was young. In the novel, Constance and Mrs. Bolton are sorting through one of the “lumber rooms” in Wragby. We would call them the attic rooms. While doing so—by the way, Mrs. Bolton has guessed that Constance is in love with Mellors but protects her privacy–they find a curious object that obviously was bought by a long-ago Chatterley, then left in the lumber room, unused. Lawrence describes this object–a large, decorated box that opens and then opens further, like those doll eggs from Russia–with loving care. You can really “see” it. It holds medicine bottles, a manicure set, stationery and pens, never used, a sewing and darning set plus other small practical items. Its many doors close up and the whole thing fits together. Mrs. Bolton goes out of her mind with joy upon examining it and can’t stop praising it; Constance, being a nice, sweet woman impulsively gives it to the nurse.
Now why this long description of something found unused in a dull attic room? I never knew this until I began to write myself. I think DHL, like a lot of writers, just liked writing!! He obviously had seen this box someplace and liked it. So he put it in the book to show Constance’s generous nature. At this point, when the two women are enjoying themselves, they come across the ancient rosewood cradle of the Chatterley family. That’s another small detail but lovely; Constance stares at it and Mrs. Bolton comments that it’s a shame that it wouldn’t be of use now because Clifford is impotent. Connie says that “she may have a child one day.” And Mrs. Bolton is thinking that she’s aiming at having a child by Mellors–put into the old aristocratic cradle of the Chatterley family!!! She takes joy in this which is a whole different issue.
lgmwriting 