(Sorry, I read this so long ago I don't remember much about it other than that I thought it was interesting, so gave it four stars on GoodReads)

This dual narrative, of D H Lawrence's inner and creative life, alongside his trial for indecency following the publication of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', is timely and engaging. Focusing on a moment in Lawrence's biography that would come to define him and the Britain he was living in, is an astute move and allows MacLeod to elevate the biography into a 'state of the nation' text.

With thanks to #Netgalley in exchange for an honest review
#Tenderness #bloomsburypublishing

Tenderness was quite the epic novel - as promised in the blurb and other publisher notes attached to it. Epic in the sense of length, character cast and yet not really in the 'sweeping saga' attire it was supposedly clad in.
At 650 pages plus, though the premise had promise, this was not a page turner, nor did it have strength in it's longevity.
An interesting subject matter, a thoroughly fascinating look at the ways and means by which publishing and censorship can strikingly clash, but in a narrative structure that meandered and could have got the same job done in about half of the pages written here.
MacLeod drops us into events at some locale of the Mediterranean in 1928, where her manifestation of the author, D. H. Lawrence is racing to finish the once controversial Lady Chatterly's Lover - yet he knows it will be censored. At this point in his life, he is a dying and already exiled author. Irregardless, he publishes it privately, loses his copies to customs, and dies with nothing.
This opening section intrigued - in MacLeod dropping us into the actionable events of the author's plight, enigmas were aplenty from the get go and readers will genuinely invest in the final hopes or outcomes of the Lawrence life and estate.
Then the meandering began, in which there was a lot of exposition, a lot of talking around what should be the book's core focus, in order to set up a premise that essentially is not useful in reaching the final endpoint of Tender....450 or so pages later...
The following set of chapters flash forward thirty years, and taking the character and presumptive life of a pre-election Jackie Kennedy learning that publishers are trying to bring Chatterly - at this point a long-censored novel - to publication. The US government has responded by taking the book to court. Herein, the postulation of the love she has for the 'forbidden' book leads to her attendance at the trial - supposedly the intent here is to add drama or further intrigue to the publication story of Chatterly. But in MacLeod's tethering of more famous faces to the book, this becomes a trite and somewhat overblown segment included to show how Kennedy wanted to honour a novel she loves. The reader may just question why or if it was needed.
Add to this another subplot about J. Edgar Hoover who is tracking her actions, noting her interest and her outrage...and we are another 200 pages further forward with nothing to show for a plot as such. This started to become a very long series of vignettes about interactions with adjacently facing events linked to the novel

This is then a book, however well-written, with a range of characters that do feel rounded and complete, slowly rambles towards a conclusion - some coverage of the obscenity trial that hoped to abolish the book, and then the character portraits of the men and women who fought for its publication.

Not a bad premise - not even, in places, a bad execution of telling the story of this novel. But with such a crisp, direct and adept prose style, and skill in drawing characters to life, MacLeod certainly did not need to draw out this story to such lengths to really get readers understanding the plight of Lady Chatterly's Lover, DH Lawrence or the legacy he left behind.

A brilliant and breath-taking novel that carried me along.
Alison Macleod weaves a rich tapestry of the people and events, both private and personal, that culminated in the landmark Lady Chatterley trial.
The writing is quite wonderful, underpinned by impressive and meticulous research that vividly brings to life the world of Lawrence and the Kennedys, along with a host of other characters.
‘Tenderness’ is a tour de force, well deserving of the accolades it has already received, and hopefully with many more to come.

It's strange knowing the novel “Lady Chatterley's Lover” was subjected to obscenity trials in 1960 and became the focus of heated public debate. The language and subject matter used in this book is hardly considered shocking today which is probably part of the reason why D. H. Lawrence isn't a particularly fashionable or widely-read author anymore - that and the fact the book contains weirdly paranoid anti-Semitic and homophobic ideas expressed by the character of Mellors. Some people would probably argue that looking down on this novel originally published in 1928 for its outdated attitudes is censorship of a different kind but to me it feels like common sense to rigorously critique any book that makes such statements. Yet, the furore surrounding Lawrence's final novel in 1960 is even more bizarre than it first appears when you know what a special interest the FBI took in the trials. This stirred author Alison MacLeod's imagination as well and inspired her to write the novel “Tenderness” - the title which Lawrence originally contemplated calling what became “Lady Chatterley's Lover”.

I love novels such as “Arctic Summer” by Damon Galgut and “The Master” by Colm Toibin which reimagine the lives of authors and consider how their writing was produced alongside events they experienced. It's irresistible to wonder about the personality behind a great book with all the intense passion and dedication which must have gone into writing it. MacLeod adds another dimension to this in her novel by inserting some lines by Lawrence within her story about his journey and the fate of his novel to show the interplay between life and text. The novel begins with the final part of Lawrence's life when he was suffering from tuberculosis, bickering with his wife Frieda and living in voluntary exile on the continent. It then moves onto the events surrounding the trials which take place 30 years after Lawrence's death including a FBI special agent who trails after Jackie Kennedy. He photographs the soon-to-be First Lady at a hearing for “Lady Chatterley's Lover”. We delve into Jackie's perspective and follow a young female literature student whose family was satirised in a short story by Lawrence. Amidst this, the novel frequently flashes back to moments in Lawrence's earlier life, his financial/artistic/romantic struggles and his interaction with other literary figures including E. M. Forester and Katherine Mansfield. The novel also includes a short sequel to “Lady Chatterley's Lover” imagining what events might have followed after the end of Lawrence's story.

So there is a lot going on in MacLeod's ambitious novel and it skilfully utilizes its 600 pages to fully integrate all these elements into a coherent and bewitchingly epic story. It's engaging and insightful how it does so with many tantalizing moments of conflict and camaraderie. The question of the morality of “Lady Chatterley's Lover” is swept up into the Cold War politics of the time and attempts made to derail John F. Kennedy's election. Novelist and literary critic Rebecca West emerges as a force to be reckoned with playing and informing on different sides to accumulate power and push her own agenda. There are delicious moments of discussion between Jackie and critic Lionel Trilling about the novel's meaning and importance. Though tempestuous Lawrence sharply critiques and fights with E. M. Forester, it speaks highly of Forester's character that he still expresses admiration for Lawrence's work rather than backbiting. All these elements mix together to say something much bigger about the importance of literature and how it tangibly integrates into our lives and culture. Great books are a reflection of the present moment but they also move us forward by enhancing our sensibilities. “Tenderness” expresses this while telling a complex and riveting story of its own.

I admire the scope of this novel and the premise is intriguing. However it was very slow and felt more worthy than great.

This is an amazing book. Incredibly well written.
I wanted to read it partly because Alison was my tutor on a writing course and had talked about the amount of research she'd done for this book. I have to say that that really showed. My other reason was that my mum used to talk about reading Lady Chatterley's Lover on her way to uni - she did English - and she had to cover it with brown paper as it was considered so scandalous. Interesting to read this book in that light of that story.
So thank you for the ARC! I thoroughly recommend this book.

Deserved to make various award longlists / shortlists. Extremely accomplished and convincing portrait of DH Lawrence and Jackie Kennedy.

Absolutely amazing. I had the chance of meeting Alison as well and it was incredible to hear how she brought this book to life. it was very interesting and I'll definitely pick up Alison's work in the future!

MacLeod's concept is definitely challenging, difficult to translate into compelling fiction and I have to admit, my expectations were, sadly, not met. However, the novel itself is accessible and frequently highly readable.

Tenderness is the beautifully written, totally engrossing story of the novel Lady Chatterley's Lover and the censorship battles it faced not only at its initial publication but also later in 1960 in the UK and a year earlier in the USA. Woven in to the details of the trials is some of D H Lawrence's life and also the lives of the people he met and incorporated in to his stories. The US part of the story follows a different road with the interest of Jackie Kennedy in the novel. You build an affinity with so many of the characters and not always the main ones within the stories.

A truly great story, not an easy read at over 600 pages long but one that is definitely worth reading.

I was given a copy of Tenderness by NetGalley and the publishers in return for an unbiased review.

This is a wide ranging story of the Lady Chatterley obscenity trial in the 50’s and 60’s in England and America, which mixes fact and fiction to lead us to that point in history, with both public and private lives involved. An impressive array of academic, literary and political figures make an appearance at the trial, and in the author D H Lawrence’s life. He is both revered and vilified both in life and after his early death, having relied on the generosity of others, and ultimately as an exile from his home country. Love and sex are at the centre of both his life and the trial, long after his death, and the people’s lives he touches. Very many are left with a bad experience because of his volatile personality and difficult relationships, and those whose lives he touches are inevitably fodder for his writing, much to the dismay of those involved, but the humanity of the man is shown in small acts of kindness and indeed tenderness. This was the title he had intended for his last novel, and it certainly comes across in this work. It is a beautifully crafted piece, full of interesting people and stories, both true and imagined. We are taken back and forth in time in the unhappy later years of his marriage around the time leading up to Lady C, to the people who are touched by the trial, and also those he had befriended and apparently betrayed for his art. Personally, I was intrigued to hear about the trial, as my own father-in-law was one of the jurors, although it’s too late to quiz him about it as he’s no longer with us. I was surprised and delighted to read about Lawrence, I read his novels many years ago, but it has inspired me to go back to them, and maybe read his poetry too. This was a thoroughly enjoyable read, and unusually I could easily have picked it up again from the beginning and read it again, and I was interested enough to look up some of the ‘real’ people in it to find out more. I would thoroughly recommend it.

For over thirty years D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was one of the most scandalous books in existence. It divided public opinion, loved or loathed, often by people who’d never read it. Banned in England and America for its alleged depravity, it was the focus of an obscenity trial that arguably heralded the end of an era of social and cultural conservatism. Alison MacLeod’s Tenderness blends fact and fiction to produce an account, almost a cultural history, of Lawrence’s final novel. It’s a complex, non-linear piece opening in 1930 with a dying Lawrence, in exile from England where seized copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover have made him a wanted man. MacLeod's epic saga then moves back and forth in time to mine Lawrence’s past and his novel’s future. Along the way MacLeod takes in a bohemian colony in WW1 Sussex, 1920s’ Italy, London and Cambridge in the 1960s and, unexpectedly, Jackie Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I. in the run-up to John F. Kennedy’s bid for presidency.

MacLeod’s been fascinated by Lawrence’s work and Lady Chatterley’s Lover since her late teens and this frequently reads like a labour of love. Something that’s both a strength and a weakness, her enthusiasm for Lawrence’s clear, and sometimes infectious, but she often seems too close to her subject. The book’s breath-takingly comprehensive, meticulously researched but the level of detail can be overwhelming, and even puzzling. There are areas of repetition and digression suggesting MacLeod couldn’t resist including anything and everything that interested her from her sources - numerous passages read more like footnotes than narrative. There’s a blow-by-blow account of the famous obscenity trial against Penguin Books; an exhaustive record of the famous figures, from Katherine Mansfield to E.M. Forster, who visited Lawrence in his Sussex retreat; a mass of material on Hoover and the F.B.I, that’s not to mention the fictional characters who work to forward the slender plot.

MacLeod's concept's challenging, difficult to translate into compelling fiction: Jackie Kennedy’s imagined links to Lawrence’s “obscene” work, and Hoover’s attempts to exploit that, provide an element of tension but I didn’t find that storyline particularly convincing. Ultimately, MacLeod’s interested in what Lady Chatterley’s Lover represented, its radical potential. She explores the ways in which its highly-charged anti-war, anti-capitalist aspects, its iconoclastic representation of human sensuality might have made it so explosive in Hoover’s America and so disturbing for the old guard of English society. And through this she’s attempting to tell a wider story about the nature of fiction and its transformative potential. All of which I found intriguing, even when I didn’t actually agree with her. Overall, it’s a difficult book to sum up, at times more a series of pieces awkwardly grafted together than a coherent whole. But despite its flaws I found it accessible and frequently highly readable. I particularly enjoyed finding out about Lawrence’s wider literary circle, its links to Bloomsbury and authors I’m more familiar with, and it made me want to know more about Lawrence, a writer I’ve mostly avoided, so in that sense it was successful.

Tenderness is a sweeping historical novel which explores D.H. Lawrence's life and legacy, from his original conception of Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1915 to the book's obscenity trial in 1960, which happened in the same week as Kennedy's election.

Overall I found this an immensely enjoyable and illuminating novel; MacLeod's research is meticulous and she deftly weaves together real events, imagined events involving real-life characters and entirely imagined characters. In particular the storyline involving Jackie Kennedy, J Edgar Hoover and an FBI agent makes an effective counterpart to the obscenity trial, with both showing the "grey elderlies" who have controlled society up to this point are unable to withstand the surging tide of liberalism. Another great strength of the novel is the way that MacLeod succeeds in building genuine tension even though the outcome of both the election and the trial are already known.

MacLeod's characters are all fully realised. Lawrence, in particular, emerges as a deeply flawed figure, at times intensely voyeuristic and exploitative, but also gifted with a rare understanding of human relations. The illustrious gallery of star witnesses in the trial are convincingly sketched, and MacLeod even shows compassion for the novel's antagonists, as with this description of the prosecutor Mervyn Griffith-Jones: "He was not unaware of his own narrowness, He knew that, beneath the Savile Row suit, the barristerial silk and wig, there shivered the man who stood naked under a cold shower each morning, and who, in spite of himself, wanted a woman like Constance to love him, to forgive him, and to release him from the person he didn't know how not to be."

MacLeod's writing is engaging with some passages of beautiful lyricism. In spite of the novel's length and its non-chronological structure, it is for the most part a highly compelling read. A few passages do drag somewhat, particularly near the beginning, and at times the style becomes more biographical than novelistic, especially when writing about Lawrence's time in Sussex in 1915. A couple of stylistic choices felt a little gimmicky, too - the interleaving of passages from Lady Chatterley's Lover is effective in places but began to feel rather overdone, as did the use of backwards text during some flashbacks.

For the most part, however, this is a clever, absorbing and rather beautiful book which celebrates the tenderness and intimacy of Lawrence's writing and life.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.

It is brilliant to read (and review) a book that you can really relish. I enjoyed the literary style of the author -new to me but who has excelled with this novel.
Before moving back to the South Coast in Sussex - I notice the author's first book 'Unexploded' was set in Brighton (where she now lives, I lived for a few years in Nottingham. I became involved in the DH Lawrence Society and the Haggs Farm Preservation Society - the place where a young Lawrence met his first love Jessie Chambers who was to influence his writing so much - even though he turned his back on her with unresolved sexual frustration- to travel from his beloved Eastwood, Nottingham (The Country of My Heart) across the world, including Vence in France where we find him dying with his wife Freida.
Now I am afraid I am no fan of Freida! She was the wife of a Professor (and friend to Lawrence) at Nottingham University. Despite children she was always excited by extra marital affairs and saw in Lawrence her desire being greeted with welcome arms. She also continues smoking into his face while he tries to stop coughing as the TB is taking over. A cruel woman. Somewhat like his mother who he also adored but often hated.....discuss!
But just as sex is always raised with Lawrence so too must the issue of class. Coming from a working class mining family (despite a good education and a mother forever seeking upward social mobility) Lawrence retained not just the upper class disdain but evoked how they treated people that he grew up with in the mining community. He once recalled the terror of queuing to collect his father's wages and the Barber family who owned the mine and still refuse to have his mark on literary history acknowledged fully in the local area are barely camouflaged as Lord Chatterley and others of the upper classes who appear in his novels. Lawrence and Freida were also called 'spies' at one point during the war. Now that's a good tale.
So all good stuff.
But then we move to the other story within the book. Jackie Kennedy is recalling her early days with husband Jack Junior as he moves his way through the political maze in Washington. We find her juxtaposition within the tale as she disguises herself to attend the US trial of the American publishers of 'Lady Chatterley'. But the forces against her, or more notably against her husband, communism, leftie arty, pornographic and any other prejudice (obviously racial) are brought into the plot with McCarthyism and Hoover at the FBI.
Overall it's the hypocrisy that the author weaves through the book that is the main point.
But just as Netflix release details of an new film adaptation of 'Lady Chatterley' with Emma Corrin (Lady Di in The Crown) as Constance Chatterley - presumably there is still mileage in dear Mellors in the woodshed. Annoyingly the American part calls him the 'caretaker' when of course he was the 'gamekeeper' and I do feel the publishers are prioritising this for a US market. But they may bolt at the fact that there's not much explicit sex in it! I liked the way the author weaved in some of the original text through both stories, although the F*** word makes an appearance - so hide your copy in brown paper!!!!

‘Tenderness’ is a cleverly written novel focusing on aspects of DH Lawrence’s life, his writing and his many literary friends and acquaintances. Unfortunately, whilst celebrating Lawrence’s brave insistence on an honest exploration of sexuality, it also reminds me of how much I dislike this author’s assumptions and male-centric writing style, so well does the author recreate his voice. The way in which Alison MacLeod details the story of the 1960 trial of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 is the most appealing element of the narrative for me.
Certainly a novel for fans of Lawrence, and perhaps for those who know little of his work.
My thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury Circus for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair review.

A beautifully written and structured novel is fast paced and very engrossing. The characters are beautifully developed by he author without any sensationalism creating an utilmately uplifting and enlightening read. Fan of Lawrence will adore this.

This book was clever and suspenseful from the first page. A real delight. It’s quite rare to have something like this – so clean, well-crafted, but also moving – that I didn’t want it to end.

From the amount of time it took me to finish this book, you would not have guessed at its length - I was so absorbed in the interwoven stories that I only ever put it down reluctantly.

I will definitely pick up my (only one, but maybe more in the future) D H Lawrence books from the shelf after reading this. I loved reading about his life and writing style, having never thought about it for very long before. Now the phoenix on my copy of Sons and Lovers makes a little sense!

The book also raises some large and important questions, which I loved. I particularly enjoyed the insights into the 1950s/60s censorship culture and the changing societies in the UK and US.

This epic novel is mesmerizingly beautiful and without a doubt the best book I have read in a great many years. I'm not sure I will read a better book in this lifetime.
The novel moves with the pace of a thriller. The structure is stunning. D.H. Lawrence is tenderly and lovingly drawn and the huge cast of literati contemporaries add a realism and awareness that no factual biography could equal.
What makes this book so magnificent is the way in which the author has brought together Lawrence and his contemporaries, Jackie Kennedy, the FBI, and the London trial with the precision of a vintage timepiece.
Existing Lawrence fans will love and cherish this novel. Anyone new to Lawrence will rush to their nearest bookshop and buy everything they can find by him.
Like Lady Chatterley's Lover this is a novel to appreciate and learn from. It is profoundly intelligent and perceptive, compelling and uplifting, and utterly unforgettable.