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Lady C<\/em> and the Royal Family<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The press gave considerable coverage in October to Queen Camilla\u2019s confession that she secretly read Lady Chatterley\u2019s Lover<\/em> when she was young.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n “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.<\/em><\/p>\n (BBC<\/a>, 10 October, or see The Daily Mail<\/a><\/em>)<\/p>\n 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).<\/em><\/p>\n (The Book That Changed My Life<\/em> BBC2, 9pm, The Times<\/em>, 14 October)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Camilla was born in July 1947 so she was 13 when the Penguin unexpurgated version was published.\u00a0 A perfect age for secretly reading the book by torchlight.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The story of the Royal Family reading Lady Chatterley\u2019s Lover<\/em> stretches all the way back to George V.\u00a0 George V supposedly read the book in 1933, having confiscated it from the queen, arguing that it was \u2018his duty to study the kind of temptations to which his subjects were exposed\u2019.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n There have also been comparisons between the royals and Lady C<\/em>.\u00a0 \u2018Lady Camilla\u2019s Lover\u2019 was a headline in 1994.\u00a0 Camilla, Charles and Diana all featured in press comparisons with Lady C<\/em>.\u00a0 Their love lives tended to make this inevitable, especially around the time of the 1993 television adaptation.\u00a0 It was even noted that Joely Richardson, who played Connie, looked like Diana.\u00a0 Richardson herself reportedly 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.\u00a0 Straight from a career-making performance as Diana in The Crown<\/i>, Emma Corrin played Connie in the later Lady Chatterley\u2019s Lover <\/em>film version, as if to confirm the connection.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Recent coverage of Queen Camilla’s reading habits also resulted in more letters to the press about Lady Chatterley\u2019s Lover<\/em>.\u00a0 Readers shared their memories of reading it, such as \u2018My wife’s father put her and her mother’s copy in the dustbin. They retrieved it and covered it with brown paper\u2019 (Rob Dorrell, Bath, Somerset, Daily Telegraph<\/em>, 14 Oct).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Lady C and the Royal Family The press gave considerable coverage in October to Queen Camilla\u2019s confession that she secretly read Lady Chatterley\u2019s 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 … <\/p>\n