Lady Chatterley’s Lover: Chapter 11 Summary & Analysis

Connie has started clearing out some of the junk in Wragby, including a number of very ugly pictures that Sir Geoffrey had collected. While she works, Connie suggests to Mrs. Bolton that she might have a child soon. To Mrs. Bolton’s shock, Connie hints that Clifford may be regaining his potency—an idea that Clifford himself put in her head. Silently, Mrs. Bolton wonders if Connie is actually going to have a baby with Mellors instead of her husband.

As Connie goes through the old objects, she comes across a giant box, filled with secret compartments and expensive toiletries. Mrs. Bolton loves the box, so Connie gives it to her—much to the nurse’s delight. Over the coming weeks, Mrs. Bolton has a variety of friends over to see her new treasure. And each time a new person comes to see the box, Mrs. Bolton spreads the surprising rumor of Clifford’s returning virility.

One day, Squire Leslie Winter comes over to Wragby to discuss Clifford’s idea for a new coal-mining technique. Even Winter has heard the rumor of Clifford’s newfound potency, which prompts Clifford to bring it up with Connie while she is putting some flowers in a vase. Connie is baffled that this news has traveled so far, but Clifford hopes that these rumors are actually “prophecy.”

Connie tells Clifford that Sir Malcolm has invited her to a three-week trip in Venice. Clifford is nervous about letting Connie go, but Connie fervently promises that she will return (though the real reason for her passion is her commitment to Mellors, not to her husband). Connie also thinks that a trip to Venice might give her a cover with Clifford were she to become pregnant with Mellors’s child—Clifford would just assume she’d had a lover in Venice.

At the same time, Connie has no real desire to go away, preferring to stay with Mellors. She laments that her life is always “arranged” for her: “wheels that worked one and drove one, and over which one had no real control!” On a drive, Connie feels that everything is ugly—the rainy weather, the soot-blackened buildings of Tevershall, the trashy movies, even the off-key singing of the village schoolgirls. Connie feels that “the living intuitive faculty” is dead in all the Tevershall villagers, replaced only by “mechanical yells” and will-power.

Once, the Midlands were emblematic of old England (“Shakespeare’s England,” as Connie jokes to herself). But now, this area has become too focused on money and politics and not at all alive to emotions, beauty, and art. Even as Connie feels so little hope, however, she desperately wants to bring a child into this world.  Connie’s car drives south, past the new mine at Stacks Gate, which has giant chemical works in “shapes not known to man,” “new on the face of the earth.”

On the other side of the road, Connie notices a beautiful old manor, and she thinks of the “ancestors” who must have enjoyed their lives there. Connie feels that grand houses like this (and, to some extent, like Wragby), are the only places where the old England really exists. In reality, though, even villages like Tevershall and Stacks Gate have old mining houses and pubs at the center of them—rundown buildings which have some real history, but which are not the version of old England that Connie romanticizes.

Indeed, the grand old England of Robin Hood is being torn down everywhere Connie can see; on her drive, she sees many of these stately Elizabethan homes being demolished. “This is history,” Connie thinks, “one England blots out the other.” The mines that had made these houses rich now destroyed them, just as industrial England was overtaking the agricultural England. And Connie, raised with wealth and therefore devoted to the older version of the nation, hates that this “continuity is not organic, but mechanical.”

Connie visits Leslie Winter at his mansion, which is called Shipley. Shipley has beautiful gardens and big windows, and Connie thinks it is much prettier than Wragby. Still, Shipley is now bordered on all sides by colliers, and Winter feels that he is being pushed out by the very men that (in his mind) he used to encourage. Instead of walking around, Winter just hides inside; he knows the colliers resent that their work pays for his house, and while he feels some guilt, he has no intention of bucking the system.

In less than a year, Winter will die, leaving Clifford a great deal of money in his will. None of his heirs will want to preserve Shipley so it, too, will be torn down. But now, Connie does not know any of this; all she knows is that she fears the future terribly. Her most awful realization is that the men of today are no longer men—Connie thinks that “something that men should have was bred and killed out of them,” ruined by the iron and coal. Only Mellors feels different to Connie.

When Connie returns home, Clifford wants to hear about her interactions with Winter and various townspeople. Connie implores Clifford to venture out into the world again, pointing out that he cannot expect to be adored by the working classes if he does not show his face to them, but he has no interest in doing so. Later that evening, Clifford brings up Venice, hoping Connie will not have a serious love affair there; she jokes that she would only have a minor affair. Clifford wants Connie to acknowledge marriage as something “eternal,” but Connie is troubled by the thought. 

The next morning, Connie is surprised to see Mellors’s dog in the halls of Wragby—and even more surprised when she sees Mellors talking to Clifford. She is curious how Mellors ended up as a servant, and a line of Shakespeare comes into her head (“the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings”). Connie wonders how class impacts the way that Mellors sees her.

That afternoon, Connie and Mrs. Bolton work in the garden together, planting flowers. The two have gotten closer recently, and Connie now starts asking Mrs. Bolton about her deceased husband. Mrs. Bolton believes that her late husband, Ted, was “too sensitive” to ever go in the mines; she sometimes wonders if he would rather have died than stayed working there. Mrs. Bolton admits that even now, 23 years later, she has not gotten over “the touch of him.” Mrs. Bolton feels that people are distrustful of true attraction between men and women—but despite her pain over Ted’s absence, she feels lucky to have known real love.