Alison MacLeod Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

Alison MacLeod discusses Tenderness, and how she saw the influence of Lady Chatterley's Lover in moving the twentieth century from war and censorship to sensuality and freedom.

Is there significance to the title, Tenderness?

In Lady Chatterley's Lover, the once controversial novel which sits at the heart of my novel, Lady Constance Chatterley says to her lover, the gamekeeper Mellors:

'Shall I tell you what you have that other men don't have, and that will make the future? Shall I tell you?'
'Tell me then, he replied.'
"It's the courage of your own tenderness…'

That unexpected word, 'courage', caught my eye. When, I wondered, is tenderness a courageous thing? During the legendary Old Bailey trial of 1960, a barrister called Richard Du Cann made quick notes in the defence team's court notebooks: 'Tenderness,' he wrote, adding asterisks, 'real tenderness.' I lingered over those three words as if they were a scribbled invocation. Tenderness was D.H. Lawrence's original title for Lady Chatterley, and tenderness was its defining spirit.

Could you say a little about the structure of Tenderness?

As a novel, it spans forty-five years, both world wars and the Cold War, but it's not chronological. Time and space in Tenderness are permeable to both memory and the imagination. There's a weaving of stories and histories, and an unravelling of them. Tenderness has what I think of as an organic structure,...