Lady Chatterley's Lover

Famously the subject of a court case, Lawrence's final novel is one of the most notorious and passionate love stories in literature.In the bleak aftermath of World War I, Constance, Lady Chatterley, is a young woman trapped in an unfulfilling marriage to an aristocrat whose war wounds have left him paralysed. With her husband's encouragement, she enters into a liaison with Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on their country estate in Nottinghamshire. As this illicit relationship grows into tenderness, mutual respect and sensual passion, Constance discovers that true fulfilment requires a real connection of both mind and body. Lady Chatterley's Lover shocked its original audience with its vindication of adulterous love across the class divide as well as its explicit descriptions of sex. It retains its power today as a hymn to erotic love and as an impassioned treatise on 'tender-hearted fucking' as a means to salvation from the horrors of war and the sterility of modern life. It is all the more poignant that Lawrence wrote this book - three times over - while he was dying from tuberculosis.The modern world was not interested in its salvation. Lawrence had Lady Chatterley privately printed in Italy in 1928, but strict obscenity laws in the UK rendered it unpublishable there for more than thirty years.

A brave and important book, passionate and wildly ambitious Independent on Sunday
A masterpiece Guardian

David Herbert Lawrence was born 11 September 1885 in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire. His father was a miner and his mother was a schoolteacher. In 1906 he took up a scholarship at Nottingham University to study to be a teacher. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1911. Lawrence gave up teaching in 1911 due to illness. In 1912 he met and fell in love with a married woman, Frieda Weekley, and they eloped to Germany together. They were married in 1914 and spent the rest of their lives together travelling around the world. In 1915 Lawrence published The Rainbow which was banned in Great Britain for obscenity. Women in Love continues the story of the Brangwen family begun in The Rainbow and was finished by Lawrence in 1916 but not published until 1920. Another of Lawrence's most famous works, Lady Chatterley's Lover, was privately printed in Florence in 1928 but was not published in Britain until 1960, when it was the subject of an unsuccessful court case brought against it for obscenity. As well as novels, Lawrence also wrote in a variety of other genres and his poetry, criticism and travel books remain highly regarded. He was also a keen painter. D.H. Lawrence died in France on 2 March 1930.

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