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Gondola/Gondolier
The Midlands is a rural region in the central part of England. Though the Midlands once signaled rolling hills, peaceful peasants, and Elizabethan-era grandeur—as shown in the stories of Robin Hood—by the time Lady Chatterley’s Lover begins, the Midlands have been cut up and polluted by a great number of large-scale mines. The Midlands are also home to a number of dialects, which Mellors speaks (and then, at one point, teaches to Connie).
Midlands Quotes in Lady Chatterley’s Lover
The Lady Chatterley’s Lover quotes below are all either spoken by Midlands or refer to Midlands. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 4
Quotes
He seemed alert in the foreground, but the background was like the Midlands atmosphere, haze, smoky mist. And the haze seemed to be creeping forward. So when he stared at Connie in his peculiar way, giving her his peculiar, precise information, she felt all the background of his mind filling up with mist, with nothingness. And it frightened her. It made him seem impersonal, almost to idiocy.
And dimly she realized one of the great laws of the human soul: that when the emotional soul receives a wound shock, which does not kill the body, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only appearance. It is really only the mechanism of the reassumed habit. Slow, slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise, which only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche.
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Chapter 14
Quotes
“So proud!” she murmured, uneasy. “And so lordly! Now I know why men are so overbearing! But he's lovely, really. Like another being! A bit terrifying! But lovely really! And he came to me!”—She caught her lower lip between her teeth, in fear and excitement.
The man looked down in silence at the tense phallos, that did not change […]. “Tha ma’es nowt o’ me, John Thomas. Art boss? of me? Eh well, tha’rt more cocky than me, an’ that says less. John Thomas! Dost want her? Dost want my Lady Jane? […] Tell Lady Jane tha wants cunt. John Thomas, an’ th’ cunt o’ Lady Jane!”
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Get the entire Lady Chatterley’s Lover LitChart as a printable PDF.
Midlands Term Timeline in Lady Chatterley’s Lover
The timeline below shows where the term Midlands appears in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1
...lost his father—has returned to Wragby Hall, newly made a baronet. Wragby is in the Midlands, and Clifford is proud of the expansive, “melancholy” park he has inherited. Clifford has a...
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Chapter 7
...come to Sicily with him, but she refuses. Instead, the sisters go back to the Midlands, where Hilda threatens that she will send Connie to live with Sir Malcolm if Clifford...
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Chapter 11
Once, the Midlands were emblematic of old England (“Shakespeare’s England,” as Connie jokes to herself). But now, this...
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