Tenderness
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
"Powerful, moving, brilliant . . . an utterly captivating read, and I came away from it with this astonished thought: There's nothing this writer can't do." --Elizabeth Gilbert
For readers of A Gentleman in Moscow and Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, an ambitious, spellbinding historical novel about sensuality, censorship, and the novel that set off the sexual revolution.
On the glittering shores of the Mediterranean in 1928, a dying author in exile races to complete his final novel. Lady Chatterley's Lover is a sexually bold love story, a searing indictment of class distinctions, and a study in sensuality. But the author, D.H. Lawrence, knows it will be censored. He publishes it privately, loses his copies to customs, and dies bereft.
Booker Prize-longlisted author Alison MacLeod brilliantly recreates the novel's origins and boldly imagines its journey to freedom through the story of Jackie Kennedy, who was known to be an admirer. In MacLeod's telling, Jackie-in her last days before becoming first lady-learns that publishers are trying to bring D.H. Lawrence's long-censored novel to American and British readers in its full form. The U.S. government has responded by targeting the postal service for distributing obscene material. Enjoying what anonymity she has left, determined to honor a novel she loves, Jackie attends the hearing incognito. But there she is quickly recognized, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover takes note of her interest and her outrage.
Through the story of Lawrence's writing of Lady Chatterley's Lover, the historic obscenity trial that sought to suppress it in the United Kingdom, and the men and women who fought for its worldwide publication, Alison MacLeod captures the epic sweep of the twentieth century from war and censorship to sensuality and freedom. Exquisite, evocative, and grounded in history, Tenderness is a testament to the transformative power of fiction.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In this moving historical novel, wonderful things happen when art stands up to censorship. British Canadian author Alison MacLeod explores the inspiring story behind author D. H. Lawrence’s brave and controversial novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In 1928, Lawrence published the novel privately, knowing that its honest depiction of sexuality would prompt swift censorship. But it wasn’t until 1960—three decades after the author’s death—that the full text was finally made available to the public, prompting a British trial that ended in a groundbreaking win for the publisher. MacLeod deftly weaves factual accounts together with fictionalized characters and events, bringing to life the struggles around sensuality, class, and freedom of speech that marked both of these turbulent historical periods. Tenderness is a story about love—and the fight to celebrate it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
MacLeod (All the Beloved Ghosts) pulls off a magnificent nonlinear spin on Lady Chatterley's Lover and the censorship of literature during D.H. Lawrence's life and beyond. Lawrence first glimpses Rosalind Baynes, the inspiration for Constance Chatterley, in 1915 Sussex. After he and his wife, Frieda, leave England—which has seized and destroyed all copies of The Rainbow—a few years later, Lawrence has a rapturous three-week liaison with Rosalind near Florence in 1920. He chooses not to leave Frieda, and infuses the charged sexuality of his bond with Rosalind—along with his frustration with his dead marriage and England's hypocrisy, imperialism, and class divisions—into Lady Chatterley's Lover, completed in 1928 and deemed much too explicit for commercial publication. In 1959, Jackie Kennedy, an admirer of the book and, like Constance Chatterley, a lonely wife, surreptitiously attends a hearing convened by the General Post Office of New York City to determine the legality of a new, unexpurgated edition. Soon thereafter, the British Crown decides to prosecute Penguin for its own uncut edition of the novel, and Rosalind watches from the balcony, while Jackie, back in the U.S., contemplates her future as the election unfolds. MacLeod covers an astonishingly broad range of incidents, eras, and themes in vivid prose, and depicts Lawrence's supporters and opponents with equal insight and sympathy. Her Lawrence, meanwhile, muses that a good book "sent life sparking from stranger to stranger, across spaces, decades and centuries... over rows of typographical marks; those low boundary fences of the imagination, hurdled." A triumphant demonstration of that power, this places MacLeod among the best of contemporary novelists.
