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Literary Passion · Renishaw, Derbyshire

Renishaw Hall (model for Wragby Hall)

The Sitwells' Derbyshire seat is widely credited as the model for Wragby Hall in D.H. Lawrence's once-banned 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', the century's most notorious tale of a lady and her gamekeeper. Pair with Teversal (below) for the geography of the fiction.

StatusFact & fiction
Datenovel 1928
The peopleD.H. Lawrence, the Sitwell family, Lady Chatterley (fictional), Mellors (fictional)
The siteRenishaw Hall & Gardens, Renishaw
Coordinates53.30256, -1.34722 (confidence 5/5)

The story

Renishaw Hall, seat of the Sitwell family in Derbyshire for four centuries, is widely named as the model for Wragby Hall in D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover — but the story is funnier than the legend. Lawrence and his wife Frieda visited only once, invited by Sir Osbert Sitwell, and by Edith Sitwell's own account they were ushered in the front door and straight out the back into the garden, seeing nothing of the house but the hall. Lawrence's fictional Wragby is pointedly plain, "without much distinction" — which the grand Renishaw is not. Lawrence, a miner's son from nearby Eastwood, wrote the novel in three ever-franker versions between 1926 and 1928 and had it privately printed in Florence in 1928. Its story — an aristocratic wife, her paralysed husband, and the gamekeeper Mellors, told in deliberate plain Anglo-Saxon — made it unpublishable in Britain until 1960. Renishaw's gardens and hall are open to visitors.

More stories at this spot

The judge's wife's copy

The paperback Mr Justice Byrne used at the trial was annotated in the margins — not by him, but by his wife, Lady Dorothy Byrne, who marked the significant passages and carried it into court each day in a small damask bag she had sewn herself. It sold at auction in 2018 for £56,250, and the government placed an export bar to keep it in Britain.

Lady Ottoline's stonemason

Some critics trace part of the plot to Lady Ottoline Morrell — the Garsington hostess who appears elsewhere in this book — and her reported affair with "Tiger," a young stonemason brought in to carve plinths for her garden statues. Lawrence knew Morrell well, and she suspected, not without cause, that she had been put into his fiction.

Sources

Nearby on the map

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Teversal is generally accepted as the model for Lawrence's fictional colliery village Tevershall. Teversal Manor is one traditional candidate for Wragby Hall, but no single real house can be identified as definitive.

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Documented historyHot spot

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