The story concerns a young married woman, the former Constance Reid (Lady Chatterley), whose upper-class Baronet husband, Sir Clifford Chatterley, described as a handsome, well-built man, is paralysed from the waist down because of a Great War injury. In addition to Clifford's physical limitations, his emotional neglect of Constance forces distance between the couple. Her emotional frustration leads her into an affair with the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. The class difference between the couple highlights a major motif of the novel, which is the unfair dominance of intellectuals over the working class. The novel is about Constance's realisation that she cannot live with the mind alone but must also be alive physically. That realisation stems from a heightened sexual experience that Constance has felt only with Mellors, suggesting that love can happen with only the element of the body, not just the mind.