Tenderness – Alison Macleod

Description

An ambitious, spellbinding historical novel about sensuality, censorship, and the power of fiction. TENDERNESS explores the creation of D.H. Lawrence’s ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, the novel that set off the sexual revolution. In telling the story of its inspirations, publication and suppression, MacLeod celebrates the power of the reader and the human imagination to change a century.

In 1928, on a hillside overlooking the city of Florence, 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. It is also a vision of how society might heal following the devastation of war. But the author, D. H. Lawrence, knows his novel will be censored. He publishes it privately, loses his copies to customs, and dies bereft.

Thirty years later, in her last days before becoming first lady, Jackie Kennedy – in real life, a great admirer of D. H. Lawrence’s novels – learns that publishers are trying to bring his long-censored novel to American and British readers in its full form. The government has responded by taking the book to court. Determined to enjoy the anonymity she has left and to honour a novel she loves, Jackie attends the trial. But there she is quickly recognized, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover – in real life, an enemy of the novel – takes note of her interest and her outrage.

Ultimately a work of fiction, TENDERNESS is closely researched and based on historical events, many of them little-known or overlooked. Through the story of Lawrence’s writing of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover,’ the obscenity trial that sought to suppress it, and the men and women who fought for its publication, Booker Prize–long-listed author 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.