Lady Chatterley vs Miss Marple Transcript
Caroline:: A hundred years ago this year, Lady Chatterley was born, soon appearing in DH Lawrence’s highly controversial novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1928. Another very famous female literary character was born at almost exact the same time – Miss Marple, who made her debut in 1927. Lawrence’s novel became famous for its detailed descriptions of the passionate affair between Connie Chatterley and Mellors the gamekeeper. In many countries including the USA and the UK, it was not publishable in its unedited form for at least another 30 years. Miss Marple might not seem to have much in common with the adulterous young wife of Sir Clifford Chatterley, but are the Miss Marple stories as chaste as they seem or is sex to be found lurking within them?
Music
Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton. But today, it’s not me that is taking you back a hundred years to a seismic literary moment of the 1920s. My husband, Guy Cuthbertson, is in charge of this one. I’ll let him explain further.
Music
Guy: Agatha Christie was once a great admirer of DH Lawrence’s work, according to the Autobiography that she wrote towards the end of her life – all those years later, she recalled how Lawrence influenced her first attempts to write stories. She was not alone in that –Lawrence was an influence on many writers, especially when they were young. Born in 1885, only five years before Christie, and publishing his first novels before the First World War and then through the 1920s until his death in 1930, Lawrence was a new and influential voice in fiction at the time of the Golden Age. And references to his work do appear in Golden Age detective fiction: Cecil Day Lewis is an example - he refers to Lady Chatterley’s Lover several times in the detective stores he wrote as Nicholas Blake. In A Question of Proof in 1935 a character called Gadsby is looking for a book in the lockers in the Common Room at a school, and another character called Tiverton tells him to keep his nose out of his locker, so Gadsby replies, ‘Got Lady Chatterley tucked away in there, have you?’. In There’s Trouble Brewing two years later, there’s a character called Miss Mellors. Later, Day-Lewis would name a character Charles Blair-Chatterley in End of Chapter (1957), and also use the name of the Chatterley home, Wragby, in his Christmas story The Sad Variety in 1964, which is about a Professor Alfred Wragby whose daughter is kidnapped. Day Lewis was a witness at the famous Chatterley trial in London in 1960 where a variety of famous writers were called upon to defend the book with the result that the publishers Penguin were able to publish the unexpurgated edition. Day Lewis reportedly caused some excitement when he admitted to the court that yes he was also Nicholas Blake, the writer of detective stories.
Agatha Christie was not a witness at the trial and in her Autobiography she didn’t say that she admired Lady Chatterley’s Lover specifically; but she mentions The Plumed Serpent, Sons and Lovers and The White Peacock. It’s odd that Christie mentions The Plumed Serpent, which was published in 1926, not long before Lady Chatterley’s Lover and some time after Christie’s own career had begun. The Plumed Serpent is a controversial, and not especially popular, book of sex and paganism. Lawrence was, you could say, sex-obsessed. He celebrates it, worships it indeed. Lady Chatterleys’s Lover was the most extreme instance and the most controversial. Connie Chatterley cheats on her disabled wealthy war veteran mine-owner husband and the novel tells of her passionate affair with the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, who was an officer in the war too but nonetheless represents a rejection of the modern exploitative money-grabbing world of Sir Clifford. It was unpublishable and had to be censored in order to be published in the UK in 1932 in an authorised edition – Christie too has also been controversial and there have been attempts to change her books, although not for that reason. Her offence has been more in terms of race than sex. It is interesting though how what we consider offensive has changed, even in terms of language. Lawrence used the f-word and c-word in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which has certainly been controversial, but Christie used the N-word in, for instance, the Marple novel Sleeping Murder. In that sense, Miss Marple might be more likely to offend now than Lady Chatterley’s Lover is.
Miss Marple first appeared at almost the exact same time as Lady Chatterley’s Lover which was published privately in Italy in early 1928 – Miss Marple first appeared in print in December 1927 so it is nice to think of Marple stories and Lady Chatterley’s Lover arriving at the same time, a mail-order copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover lurking on the bedside table in 1928 as someone read a Marple story before bed, the two newly-minted women each a fresh and exciting discovery for the reader. We should bring those two great women, Connie and Jane, together - incidentally Jane is a name that Connie is also given in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, somewhat indecently.
Christie said in her autobiography that it is possible that Miss Marple arose from the pleasure she had taken ‘in portraying Dr Sheppard’s sister in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the novel published in 1926, the year of The Plumed Serpent and the year in which Lawrence started writing the story of Lady Chatterley. Christie was nonetheless vague about why she created Miss Marple. One cannot help wondering whether this happily never-married singleton, who has never experienced the horrors or disappointments of marriage, was partly created, however unconsciously, in response to the painful collapse of Christie’s own marriage during 1926 following her husband’s adultery. In Miss Marple books we see a spinster with no sex life living among well-dressed genteel folk in a chocolate-box England of good manners, afternoon tea and sexual repression. We don’t expect sex. Sigmund Freud, the psychoanalyst, the great expert on repression, was an avid reader of Agatha Christie’s work, and perhaps it was the repression that attracted him. The critic Erik Routley spoke about detective stories as ‘Puritan’ – they are not associated with sex. One newspaper recently observed that none of Christie’s detective novels ‘included any sex or swearing’. We see certainly that the books do not contain descriptions of sexual intercourse. They could not be called explicit – the bedroom door remains closed we could say. They are family-friendly mysteries. They don’t offend with sex any more than they wallow in blood and gore. Nor do the books use the kind of rude or vulgar language of sex that got Lawrence in hot water. The titles of Marple books might attract the eye of an ignorant reader in search of erotica - The Moving Finger, The Body in the Library, They Do it with Mirrors, What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!, Double Sin – but they are far from being erotic novels. Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the Marple stories seem to be different kinds of literature, as much as Lady Chatterley and Miss Marple are different types of person. You might even feel that you need to take sides – are you a Chatterleyite or a Marpleite? In fact, the character stands for the kind of book that they inhabit – Lady C daring, controversial, liberated and highly sexually active, and Miss M prim and proper, discreet, gentle, old maidish but very sharp.
In 1939, in an article called ‘The Chastity of Murderers’ in The Tatler, the writer Michael Arlen complained about the unrealistic chastity of the characters in Agatha Christie’s books. He felt that they don’t have sex lives: ‘the unassailable chastity of all these people […] is getting a bit too thick altogether’. He said that in fiction of the 1930s people were regularly jumping into bed with each other, especially in books set in the countryside. Incidentally, Arlen is often identified as the inspiration for the character Michaelis in Lady Chatterley’s Lover – Michaelis has an affair with m’lady before the gamekeeper does. The countryside has a very amorous effect on the characters in modern novels, he says, but no such action occurs in murder mysteries. According to Arlen there is not even an ‘arch hint of zizipompom’. Not even for what he calls the girl ‘with all the earmarks of a pretty hot number’. Married couples make us wonder whether they have done anything constructive. In Agatha Christie’s fiction, ‘they grimly sleep alone.’
That unusual word of Arlen’s, zizipompom, which he had introduced in The Tatler a month before, is not used by Christie as far as I know, although John Dickson Carr would later use it in his fiction. But was Arlen fair to Agatha Christie? We look at the Marple books and we see that there is sexual content – rather a lot of it – but it is veiled and politely dealt with. It’s rather intriguing to see how Christie deals with this – it’s not chaste, there’s plenty of filth, but we could hardly notice it. Sex as a word does occasionally occur, early on in the story "The Herb of Death" in 1930, or later in A Murder is Announced in 1950 where sex was a fad –‘ After the last war, we went in for sex. Now it’s all frustration.’ Or n 1962’s The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side we are told that Marina Gregg was a film star before the modern obsession with curviness and ‘vital statistics’ (even though in the film version she is played by Elizabeth Taylor). We are told that she ‘could not have been described as Sex Incarnate, or “The Bust” or “The Torso.”’ She is the tall thin bony beauty like a Garbo. She gave her films ‘personality’ rather than ‘mere sex’. In A Caribbean Mystery two years later, we learn that "Sex" as a word had not been mentioned in Miss Marple’s young days; but there had been plenty of it – not talked about so much – but enjoyed far more than nowadays, or so it seemed to her’. Marple recalls that sex was called Sin once upon a time, but now it was ‘a kind of Duty’. This was after the famous Chatterley trial of 1960, which has often been associated with the arrival of the 1960s permissive society. We can take her thoughts as a criticism of Lady Chatterley and her influence.
In Nemesis in 1971 we are told that too much attention is paid to sex, which cannot replace love. The words love and romance are more likely in Marple stories than sin and sex are, but also Christie has an ear for euphemistic British language – this is chaste language in a way, but we know what it is referring to. Christie loves the way British people gossip about these things and try to speak in an everyday code - it’s Christie’s love of language that comes out in these instances. Women in the village gossiping about, shall we say, a young woman seen sunbathing or going into a bachelor’s home one evening, or an elderly bachelor buying flowers for a handsome widow. They use language that wouldn’t even make a choirboy blush but which contains all manner of sins. Looseness: a ‘loosening of moral fibre’. Someone ‘naughty’. A ‘nasty old man’ perhaps. A gent with ‘a roving eye’ or ‘an old fool’. You know, ‘one of that kind’ or ‘the sort of person’. ‘That kind of thing’, ‘getting ideas’, ‘a bit of dirt’, ‘having the come hither in your eye'. Is there ‘something between them’? Was she in ‘the altogether’? The altogether, that term for nudity, is memorably used in Murder at the Vicarage during a discussion about the painter Lawrence Redding (a man with the name and characteristics of writer Lawrence): he’s bound to be loose because he’s an artist: ‘An artist! Paris! Models! The Altogether!’. There follows an exchange about him painting Griselda the vicar’s wife, with a joke about whether she too could be in the altogether.
In Murder at the Vicarage, Miss Marple is nervous talking about sex and romance pausing with an 'er' before using the very word sex, the only appearance of the word in the novel:
‘There’s money, and the mutual attraction between people of an—er—opposite sex.’
Conversations could be built entirely on suggestion and euphemism, even in the 1960s, after the Chatterley trial, as in The Mirror Crack'd where a discussion about the character Gladys’s love life involves not getting any wrong ideas and ‘Our Gladys isn’t that sort’. DH Lawrence on the other hand is very specific and nothing is hidden – although he has a taste for poetic or erotic euphemisms too, usually involving the word ‘secret’ but these are not detective fiction secrets - secret, sensitive thing, secret warmth, secret entrances, secret openings, secret places. You get the picture. And nothing much is a secret in the unexpurgated novel.
In Christie’s The Moving Finger, the sexual content, the bad language, the filth, is all there in the plot, in the poison pen letters that are at the heart of the story, but we don’t get to read the letters. The members of Lymstock have received these anonymous letters that make scandalous accusations – words and letters have been cut out of a book and stuck onto paper in the classic way, spelling out things that are described as foul, disgusting, dirty, filled with ‘vituperative and obscene abuse’. Recipients read them, and they show them to other people, but we are left in the dark. We get a few suggestions, but we don’t get the abuse in any of the detail that could shock Christie’s readers. Mrs Dane Calthrop tells us about a letter making an accusation about Caleb and the school-mistress even though ‘Caleb has absolutely no taste for fornication. He never has had.’ Which is lucky apparently because he’s a clergyman. Christie doesn’t tell us very much, so we have to use our imaginations. This is all part of the power of detective fiction – we need to fill in the gaps. Reading detective fiction inevitably reveals things about the reader too. We might not have much desire to imagine Caleb and the schoolmistress but we would need to imagine what the letter said.
Sometimes the story introduces the possibility that sex is important but then persuades us that it is not an issue. Take The Body in the Library: the young woman on the floor, we are told, ‘was virgo intacta, by the way.’ With the virgo intacta – the Latin serving as another kind of euphemism – we told to not consider the victim’s sex life. It is not quite that simple in that case though. Sex is repeatedly introduced then taken away: we are told that there are men who commit sexual crimes, and ‘Oh, yes, there are such cases’, but ‘we’ve no knowledge of any one of that kind operating in this neighbourhood.’ But The Body in the Library is a risque book in its own way. Chapter 1 begins with the vicar’s wife in a bathing costume and ends with the blonde sunbathing in shorts and a brassiere. Like Lawrence’s, the Marple stories are full of bodies one way or another and they get a lot of attention.
Christie likes the comic contrast between the setting and the goings on within it. So in The Moving Finger we are told ‘Somehow one didn’t expect that kind of thing in the placid backwater of Lymstock.’ Lady Chatterley’s Lover plays a similar game in fact – we don’t expect a country house novel set in the English countryside to be full of passionate descriptions of sex between Connie Chatterley and Mellors. And Mellors is a servant, he is not supposed to be the romantic interest for someone like Lady Chatterley. And he’s a gamekeeper – gamekeepers were not romantic figures, no one fancied gamekeepers. The mistake is sometimes made of imagining Mellors as a gardener – gardeners can be sexy – but no he was a gamekeeper, facilitator of slaughter and defender of the property of the rich. Relationships between master and servant do occur in Christie too, such as in "The Tuesday Night Club", or there is the reference in The Body in the Library to the woman who ten days before her wedding day ran away with the chauffeur.’
This contrast between the place and passion within it has been particularly glaring in tv adaptations which have increasingly indulged in beautiful English nostalgia while injecting extra sex into the stories. Where once the sex had to be taken out of Chatterley, it is now put into Christie. Christie on TV becomes more like a Chatterley adaptation, with sex and swearing, and Christie fans don’t always like it (Towards Zero in 2025 being particularly enraging). On television in 2004, Miss Marple was also given a romantic past – an affair with a married man no less, one Captain Ainsworth. The back story is a little bit Lady Chatterley’s Lover – both Lady C and Miss M have had an adulterous affair with a WW1 army officer. Lady Chatterley’s Lover enters through the TV adaptations too in the sense that you can spot an actor who has also appeared in a screen version of Lady Chatterley. There’s the unforgettable Lady Chatterley herself, Joely Richardson, in ‘The Dream’, a Poirot from 1989, four years before she played Lady C, or there’s her husband Sir Clifford Chatterley, the actor James Wilby, playing Stanley Kirkwood in an adaptation of The Sittaford Mystery, from 2006, which, unlike the book, included Geraldine McEwan’s Miss Marple. In the 1981 film version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Mellors is played by Nicholas Clay, who a year later was one of the leads in the Poirot film Evil Under the Sun.
Christie and Lawrence are ultimately not so different, on screen but even in print. Both indeed have rather a dark view of humanity, they especially dislike the greed, complexity and vanity of the modern age, and they are offering you an antidote – the intelligence of Miss Marple, or the passion of Connie and Mellors, or, in both, a nostalgia for an old, simpler, rural England. One novelist might prefer brains and the other might prefer loins, but if Lady Chatterley has a hundredth birthday party this year she should invite Miss Marple because they would definitely have plenty to talk about: such as that kind of thing, having the come hither in your eye, a loosening of moral fibre, or zizipompom.
Music
Caroline: This episode of Shedunnit was written and narrated by Guy Cuthbertson and produced by me, Caroline Crampton.
Guy's book, Lady C: The Long Sensational Life of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, is published on 12th May 2026. You can find more information about it at his website, guycuthbertson.com.
There are links to all the books and stories referenced in the episode description and at shedunnitshow.com/ladychatterleyvsmissmarple. I also publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.
If you'd like to stay in touch with the podcast between episodes, sign up for the weekly Shedunnit newsletter at shedunnitshow.com/newsletter. It's the best way to get more murder mystery reading recommendations and know what's coming up on the podcast before anyone else.
Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece and production assistance came from Leandra Griffith.
Thanks for listening.