At the age of 23, Constance Reid marries Clifford Chatterley, an irresistible Cambridge graduate, lieutenant and mine owner. Their honeymoon is brief. It is 1917 and Clifford is soon drafted. When he returns from the front in Flanders he is a broken man, condemned to spending the rest of his life in a wheelchair. The young couple moves to Wragby, one of Chatterley's properties. Constance looks back longingly to the years before her marriage when she spent her time with artists and students of her own age, enjoying long trips abroad. Now she feels lonely and isolated in a rural environment that bores her. It is her taciturn gamekeeper, Parkin, who will awaken Lady Chatterley’s desires, ones that she has never felt before. His life and background is so diametrically opposed to her own that at first Parkin does not trust his mistress. He does not understand what a Lady would want from a simple man such as himself.