This isn’t merely a concern about word count. We have to think about the fact that “realism” was a very new genre and as such viewed with suspicion and mistrust. Before its arrival, stories were built around the maxim. These little philosophical truisms littered the pre-novel text, and made reading an essentially educational experience. Letting Flaubert off the hook, the prosecutor reminded him that “the mission of literature ought to be to enrich and refresh the mind by elevating the understanding and refining morals.” Realism was a very strange creature in comparison; what good was it to describe what people did? Particularly when it wasn’t very enthralling or uplifting? When no principle of conduct or insight could be drawn from it? Readers were quite bewildered by extraneous information and clung to prescriptive demands for stories to subordinate their elements to a serious, sensible moral meaning.

Although Flaubert’s trial took place one hundred and fifty years ago, and whilst that means we’ve had a century and a half to get used to realism, the same concerns and the same conflicts rage over what literature should do, what it should offer the reader. There is still a tendency for readers to believe that stories should correspond to their own beliefs, and to criticise them sharply if they don’t, even if nowadays setting the law on the author hardly ever happens because the law is often on the author’s side. This only encourages authors to do what they have always done, to stir things up, to rattle bars, to break taboos and challenge society’s cherished convictions. The question isn’t really whether they should do this, but how to judge the intentions behind the provocation. And this is probably hardest to do where sexuality is concerned.

Although Flaubert’s trial took place one hundred and fifty years ago, and whilst that means we’ve had a century and a half to get used to realism, the same concerns and the same conflicts rage over what literature should do, what it should offer…

Once Lady Chatterley’s Lover had survived the obscenity trial, the book did nothing special, except sell in the millions, until 1969 when the feminist, Kate Millett found new reasons for offence in her book, Sexual Politics. This time the novel is “a quasi-religious tract” founded on worship of the male penis. “Although the male is displayed and admired so often, there is, apart from the word cunt, no reference to or description of the female genitals: they are hidden, shameful and subject.” Only equal amounts of narrative space, divided up fairly and assigned to male and female genitalia would have represented decent sexual politics for Millett, who goes on to unmask Lawrence himself as a cunning Machiavelli, unfolding a masterplan. She argued that the sexual revolution for women had alarmed Lawrence who needed a way to fight back: “it could grant women an autonomy and independence he feared and hated, or it could be manipulated to create a new order of dependence and subordination.” Persuading women to be in thrall to the penis was clearly the way forward.

Generally I like Kate Millett’s book for its caustic wit and analysis, its bold attack on men talking male nonsense about sex. But the chapter on D. H. Lawrence seems to me excessive and overly paranoid. To believe her, we have to see the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, as a sort of sex guru, bending Connie to his will, rather than a man with nothing to his name, no self-esteem and no more idea of how to run a proper relationship than Connie does. As their sexual encounters progress, Mellors gradually begins to believe that tenderness between a man and a woman is possible, and he starts to give up the gender rancour he’s been harbouring after his disappointments in love. When he parades himself naked in front of Connie, the point is that she doesn’t laugh or turn away in disgust, but accepts him, as wholeheartedly as she can. There’s something quite sweet about these scenes, and something utterly ridiculous, too. And there is never any reason to take what two people do to one another in the pages of a novel and assume it as a blueprint for the whole of humankind.