Tenderness

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Tenderness

Title :

Tenderness / Alison MacLeod.

Title:

Tenderness

Author:

MacLeod, Alison, 1964-

Format:

Books

Physical Description:

617 pages ; 25 cm

ISBN:

9781635576108

Production / Publication Information:

New York : Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021.

Contents:

These hidden things -- Fly like a boat -- Epilogue: Tenderness.

Summary:

Recreates the origins of D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover" from its private publication by Lawrence through the 1960 obscenity trial that sought to suppress the full, uncensored edition, reimagining its journey to freedom through the story of Jackie Kennedy, who was known to be an admirer.

Bibliography note:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 603-617).

Language:

English

Genre:

Historical fiction.

Novels.

Personal Subject:

Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert), 1885-1930. Lady Chatterley's lover-Fiction.

Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert), 1885-1930-Fiction.

Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy, 1929-1994-Fiction.

Subject Term:

Trials (Obscenity) -- Great Britain -- Fiction.

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Material Type	Library	Call Number	Item Barcode	Location
Book	Searching... Westford - J.V. Fletcher Library	F MACLEOD	31990005007682	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Amesbury Public Library	FIC MACLEOD	32114002664200	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library	FICTION MACLEOD	31330009101373	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Billerica Public Library	FICTION/MACLEOD	33934004482593	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Boxford Town Library	FIC MACLEOD	32115002152435	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Chelmsford Public Library	FIC/MACLEOD	31480011519508	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Groveland - Langley-Adams Library	FIC MACLEOD	32121000870556	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Haverhill Public Library	FIC/MACLEOD A	31479007504300	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Littleton - Reuben Hoar Library	F MACLEOD	39965002359486	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Lowell - Pollard Memorial Library	FIC MACLEOD	31481005569301	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Merrimac Public Library	F MAC	32125001378402	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Newbury Town Library	MAC	32127001300311	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Newburyport Public Library	FIC MACLEOD A	32128004010642	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... West Newbury - G.A.R. Memorial Library	F MAC	32135001547120	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

"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.

Reviews (3)

Publisher's Weekly Review

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. (Sept.)

Kirkus Review

D.H. Lawrence, Jackie Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover, Lionel Trilling, Lady Constance Chatterley, and a host of others meet in an inspired fusion of fact and fiction. To appreciate the delights of MacLeod's masterful novel, which takes its title from the original title of Lady Chatterley's Lover, one must have the patience to let it emerge from some dubious decisions about where to begin and how to unfold. These miscalculations recede as the full measure of the book becomes clear, about halfway through its more than 600 pages; MacLeod's material might have provided another author with several novels, a few stories, and an essay or two. One plotline--"The Exile"--unfolds in Lawrence's time, exploring the "ever-expanding 'club' of the aggrieved" he created by modeling his characters on life. Another--"The Subversive"--tracks Jackie Kennedy in the run-up to the 1960 election. A fictional FBI agent photographs Jackie at the New York obscenity trial over Chatterley; he becomes entangled in Hoover's plot to take down JFK while she meets Lionel Trilling to discuss the book. A third plotline covers the British obscenity trial in 1960; this section includes some lively fourth-wall--breaking and manages to nearly morph into a page-turner. But how closely is it based on the transcripts? Again and again, one feels eager to know where fact meets fiction--did the novelist Barbara Wall really write this wonderful, long letter to the defense attorney?--but the author is not inclined to tell us. "I have included letters and documents that have been faithfully reproduced; other such items have been invented, condensed, added to or modified for clarity," she writes at the end of the book. If you want more, she continues, go back to the original sources. Call us lazy, but we might prefer more detailed notes. Nevertheless, there is much to enjoy here. At a time when sex is so often linked with exploitation and abuse, Lawrence's central equation between physical passion and profound emotional connection is moving and nearly exotic. MacLeod's interpretation of this gospel includes a lovely Lawrentian scene of sex in a library and a thought, attributed to Jackie Kennedy, about the power derived from sex: "the secret act of beholding the public, daily person--the lover, sanctioned or illicit--transformed in one's presence into a private, raw spirit." Seriously brilliant, seriously flawed, ambitious, and delicious. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

The title of MacLeod's unwieldy but profoundly moving and, finally, quite brilliant novel is drawn from one of the working titles D. H. Lawrence used for Lady Chatterley's Lover. Stitching together multiple story lines across decades, MacLeod reimagines the creation and near-death of Lawrence's last novel, published but quickly banned in 1928 and not available in England until Penguin won a famous 1960 obscenity trial. Among the real-life characters on parade here are not just Lawrence and his circle, but also Jacqueline Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover, and Lionel Trilling. The narrative moves between Lawrence in Italy and, earlier, in England, where he met Rosalind Baynes, who would become the inspiration for Connie Chatterley. But Lawrence himself is only part of a narrative that jumps ahead in time to Cambridge in the '50s and the love affair between two graduate students, and to America, where Jackie Kennedy, a closet Lawrentian, is photographed holding a copy of Lady Chatterley by a trolling FBI agent. All of these plotlines swerve together around the London obscenity trial, (too many) great chunks of which are included in the text. Amid the novel's surfeit of story, MacLeod evokes Lawrence's world beautifully, and her Kennedy subplot works shockingly well, as does the students' relationship, which evokes the passion that powered all of Lawrence's work. Overstuffed, yes, but brimming with deeply felt life.