Lady C – Queen Camilla

 

Lady C and the Royal Family

 

The press gave considerable coverage in October to Queen Camilla’s confession that she secretly read Lady Chatterley’s Lover when she was young.

 

“As teenagers you read a lot of romances. It was the moment of Lady Chatterley, under our pillows, reading that by torchlight. You know the minute something is forbidden, you want to get hold of it,” she said about the novel that had been at the centre of an obscenity trial.

(BBC, 10 October, or see The Daily Mail)

Anchored by the presence of Queen Camilla, a keen reader who shares her own fierce faith in the power of books and their role in her own education (she fondly remembers The Scarlet Pimpernel and the thrill of reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover by torchlight).

(The Book That Changed My Life BBC2, 9pm, The Times, 14 October)

 

Camilla was born in July 1947 so she was 13 when the Penguin unexpurgated version was published.  A perfect age for secretly reading the book by torchlight.

 

The story of the Royal Family reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover stretches all the way back to George V.  George V supposedly read the book in 1933, having confiscated it from the queen, arguing that it was ‘his duty to study the kind of temptations to which his subjects were exposed’.

 

There have also been comparisons between the royals and Lady C – ‘Lady Camilla’s Lover’ was a headline in 1994.  Camilla, Charles and Diana were all drawn into comparisons with Lady C.  Their love lives tended to make this inevitable, especially around the time of the 1993 television adaptation.  It was even noted that Joely Richardson, who played Connie, looked like Diana.  Richardson herself told the story that in 1997, after Diana died, she was mistaken for a Diana impersonator during the mass mourning near Kensington Palace in central London.  Straight from a career-making performance as Diana in The Crown, Emma Corrin played Connie in the later Lady Chatterley’s Lover film version, as if to confirm the connection.  Princess Margaret was another Lady Chatterley.

 

Recent coverage also resulted in more letters to the press about Lady Chatterley’s Lover.  Readers shared their memories of reading it, such as ‘My wife’s father put her and her mother’s copy in the dustbin. They retrieved it and covered it with brown paper’ (Rob Dorrell, Bath, Somerset, Daily Telegraph, 14 Oct)