Lawrence was, by his own admission, not very good at coming up with titles. This one was suggested by Aldous Huxley's wife, possibly in a spirit of sarcasm, for Lawrence's second version of Lady Chatterley's Lover which didn't see print until the seventies, long after the definitive third version had scandalised those persons who make it their business to be scandalised by literary implications of men having it off with ladies. I haven't yet read Lady Chatterley so I don't know how well the second and third versions compare with each other, and all I know about the third version is that it made some people very angry because of all the shagging; also some vaguely recalled statement by Lawrence amounting to well, my critics say I write pornography so fuck it - let's give it to them. Obviously I'm paraphrasing here.
It's taken me all this time to get around to Lady Chatterley, albeit the rehearsal tapes in this case, mainly because the suggestion that Lawrence wrote mainly about shagging always struck me as ridiculous, so I didn't relish a novel amounting to him sneering ever get the feeling you've been cheated from the stage of the Winterland Ballroom before kicking off like Derek and Clive. Thankfully, if that novel exists - which I now realise may not actually be so - it isn't this one. Contrary to at least some of its reputation, while it's the story of an upper class woman having an affair with her gamekeeper told with particular emphasis on the sexual intercourse, it isn't even remotely pornographic. Lawrence goes into detail, but it's not the sort of detail which you'd find on the Fiesta letters page. Indeed, I'm not sure if the count of contentious words - penis, vagina and others you couldn't say back in the twenties without special dispensation from a medical professional - even reaches double figures.
That being said, I'm not convinced you could really call it erotica either, because its scope is broader and no more than a slight shift in Lawrence's usual focus on the politics of relationships between men and women. Typically, it's difficult to miss the autobiographical aspect of this tale. Constance, who is more or less Frieda with a few of Lawrence's own less acerbic views in the mix - is frustrated by her intellectually elevated but impotent husband - Lawrence the invalid, waiting for death and increasingly misanthropic - has an approximately guiltless affair with the gamekeeper, who himself amounts to Lawrence as he would wish to be, a man of honest instinct and will stripped of all bourgeoise tendencies. So it's Lawrence still trying to reconcile himself to his wife's compulsive polygamy - and almost succeeding - in a critique of his own contradictions, hypocrisy, and general bullshit. It's only erotica if you've missed the whole point.
John Thomas and Lady Jane aims fairly high in its attempt to dissect the complexities of human relationships, taking in class as well as sex; and it does well as the work of deathbed Lawrence who, by this point, was writing with unusual clarity, even maintaining the heavily symbolic import of his imagery without everything getting bogged down in metaphor and extended observations concerning flowers - although there's nevertheless plenty of flora and fauna in this one too.