#000120
Lady Chatterley's Lover
D. H. Lawrence
One of the most notorious novels in English, *Lady Chatterley's Lover* is the book that spent decades at the center of obscenity battles before it could be freely published. D. H. Lawrence wrote it late in his life, privately printing this 1928 edition in Florence with the bookseller Pino Orioli because no mainstream publisher would touch its frank sex and its four-letter Anglo-Saxon candor. Beneath the scandal is a serious novel: the affair between Constance Chatterley and the gamekeeper Mellors is Lawrence's argument for tenderness and bodily life against the deadening machinery of class and industry. The prose can be earnest to a fault, but its conviction is real. For readers interested in modernism, the history of censorship, or Lawrence's lifelong quarrel with a mechanized world, it remains essential—and still faintly dangerous.
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The author
D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), the coal-miner's son who became one of the great and most controversial modern English novelists, wrote Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love. Lady Chatterley's Lover was his last novel, completed as tuberculosis was closing in.
The book
This copy carries the text of the 1928 edition privately printed in Florence by Giuseppe 'Pino' Orioli, the only way Lawrence could issue the unexpurgated work. It tells of Constance Chatterley's affair with the gamekeeper Mellors, and uses their relationship to attack class rigidity and industrial deadness while affirming physical love.
How it has aged
The 1960 Penguin obscenity trial in Britain made the book a landmark in the loosening of censorship, and that history now overshadows the sex itself. Modern readers may find the philosophizing heavy-handed, but its sincerity and its place in literary and legal history keep it alive.
For more context
The Orioli edition was pirated almost immediately, and the novel's full text stayed effectively banned in Britain and the U.S. for over thirty years.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- D. H. Lawrence
- Year
- 1928
- Edition
- Text of the 1928 Orioli (Florence) edition
- ISBN
- None
- Format
- Hardcover
- Shelf
- Fiction
- Location
- Maine
Green library binding set