Lady Chatterley's Lover, and D. H. Lawrence's own explanation, the "Propos", do reveal how the consumptive both embraced and escaped his country. Lawrence encapsulated a rootless contempt for his background and his people, the coalmining communities of the midlands. His last novel, rewritten three times, rails against the perceived deadened inauthenticity of English life; the mannered abstraction of a scientific worldview denying the consummate union of man and wife in a real marriage. Thus, science, technology, capitalism and money are unified into a system that saps and destroys what it means to be human.

This is not a particularly old or unusual message. Nevertheless, Lawrence weaves and reinterprets conservative themes in modernist frames. Authenticity will invigorate marriage and the nation of England. To view this focus as a conservative strand within Lawrence's writing is to surrender to political constraints, when the author restructured his sense of alienation against his country. The consumptive's exile pours out through the novel, as he tries to explain why using obscenities as norms becomes a marker for an honest world of sexual union, recreating an England worth living in for the author (though it does lend the novel an air of pomposity and ambitious challenges for bad sex writers to the present day).

How sad that exile and censorship obliterated our understanding of a state of the nation novel that set out an ideal of England, standing foursquare in a wider artistic tradition that speaks with more urgency today.