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The trouble with this stuff, in terms of telling a story, lies in the fact that it cannot lead anywhere. What has brought Lady Chatterley and Mellors together, as Lawrence emphasises, is their sexuality. Theirs is not really a love story, it is a sex story. The part has subsumed the whole. Their relationship is defined by almost nothing else. As social beings they are kept firmly apart, not least by Mellors's insistence on constantly breaking into broad Derbyshire dialect, even though, as an educated former army officer, he is perfectly capable of speaking, when he chooses to, in what is known as `standard English. For a while it is possible to sustain the story's momentum by describing further variations on their lovemaking, as when the pair run naked out into the woods in the rain, and Mellors possesses his mistress from behind.2 The sense of `upping the ante' is maintained by increasing use of that limited selection of `shocking' four-letter words for which the novel was eventually to become famous (`fuck; `cunt, shit, `piss, `arse'). The exchanges between the two degenerate more and more into sentimental game-playing, as when they give each other's sexual organs the names of `John Thomas' and `Lady Jane, while decorating them with wild flowers.

In story terms, however, the problem is that they are social beings, living in a social context. It is one thing to portray them happily lost in their private little ego-world in the woods, enjoying sex. But the demand of any story is that it must develop, to work towards a climax and resolution. And here Lawrence becomes caught up in the conflict between the urge of his fantasy-self to see his hero and heroine heading off for an archetypal happy ending, and those deeper archetypal rules of storytelling which dictate that, because of the way it has been defined, their relationship cannot end that way. Most importantly, both Connie and Mellors are married to other people. And as Lawrence tries to manipulate his plot towards the point where they may be free to come as fully together in the outside world as in the privacy of the bed, the creaking of his stage machinery becomes deafening. Connie is made pregnant by Mellors, then goes off to Venice to provide cover for her story to her husband that the father is someone else. Meanwhile Mellors's harridan wife returns to claim him, creating a scandal about him carrying on with other women which leads to him being fired from his job. The plot spirals into ever more forced improbabilities, above all the wonderfully awful scene in London where Mellors meets Constance's father Sir Malcolm Reid, to win him over to their marriage:

`Sir Malcolm lit a cigar and said, heartily: "Well, young man, and what about my daughter?"

The grin flickered on Mellors's face. "Well, Sir, and what about her?"

"You've got a baby in her all right." "I have that honour!" grinned Mellors.

"Honour, by God!" Sir Malcolm gave a little squirting laugh, and became Scotch and lewd.

"Honour! How was the going, eh? Good, my boy, what?"

"Good!"

"I'll bet it was! Ha-ha! My daughter, chip of the old block, what! I never went back on a good bit of fucking, myself ... you warmed her up, oh, you warmed her up, I can see that. My blood in her! You set fire to her haystack, all right. Ha-ha-ha! I was jolly glad of it, I can tell you. She needed it ... ha-ha-ha! A game keeper, eh, my boy! Bloody good poacher, if you ask me. Ha-ha! ...."'

Lawrence finally manages to disentangle Constance from the outraged Sir Clifford, who has now sunk into an infantile mother-and-son relationship with an older female servant, Mrs Bolton. She goes to live with her father in Scotland, waiting for the baby and for her divorce. Mellors meanwhile takes a job as a farm labourer, dreaming that he and Constance might one day be able to set up home together on a small farm of their own. The story concludes with a long letter from him to Constance, bemoaning the doomed state of modern civilisation, obsessed with