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The book that changed Britain: why the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial still matters 60 years later

Lady Chatterley's Lover

A brave and important book, passionate and wildly ambitious

D H Lawrence (Author) D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence (1885-1930), novelist, poet and travel writer, was born in Nottinghamshire, the son of a miner. He won a scholarship to study at Nottingham High School and later attended University College, Nottingham. He then worked as a schoolteacher, moving to London in 1908. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1910; Sons and Lovers, the first of his masterpieces, inspired by his own youth and relationship with his mother, followed in 1913. By this time he had eloped to the continent with Frieda Weekley (née Von Richthofen), a German aristocrat, with whom for 18 years he enjoyed a famously tempestuous partnership. They lived in Germany and later Italy, returning to Britain just before the outbreak of World War I, when, Frieda having obtained a divorce, they were able to marry. The difficult war years were spent in Cornwall where the locals suspected them of spying. Two further masterpieces, The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920) were published and, for a period, banned. Both featured strong female protagonists, and dealt frankly with sexual relationships. Lawrence and Frieda lived abroad again in 1920s, travelling not only in Europe, but Australia, Ceylon, the United States and Mexico. By 1928 they had settled in Italy, near Florence where Lady Chatterley's Lover was finished and privately printed. Lawrence's TB had been diagnosed while he was in Mexico. When it became clear that he was dying Frieda took him to Germany and France in search of a cure. He died at Vence, in the south of France, in 1930. John Sutherland (Introducer) John Sutherland is Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus of Modern English Literature at University College London and previously taught at the California Institute of Technology. He writes regularly for the Guardian, The Times and the New York Times, and is the author of many books including Curiosities of Literature, Is Henry V a War Criminal? (with Cedric Watts), biographies of Walter Scott, Stephen Spender and the Victorian elephant Jumbo, and The Boy Who Loved Books, a memoir.

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.

Stop What You’re Doing and Read…Banned Books: Lady Chatterley's Lover & Moll Flanders

LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER &amp; MOLL FLANDERS: Illicit, shocking, controversial - these two books provoked quite an outcry when they were first published...read them if you dare

LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER - No one ever wrote better about the power struggles of sex and love

MOLL FLANDERS - It's still fresh, centuries on. It's raunchy yet humane, brilliantly written yet not at the expense of a fast-paced plot, and it conjures such a vivid picture of its age that it would certainly transport me off the monotony of a desert island.I've always loved Moll herself she's so feisty. All the dreadful things that befall her and she just picks herself up, dusts herself down, rearranges her cleavage and rampages off again.

D H Lawrence (Author) 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. Daniel Defoe (Author) Daniel Defoe was born in London in 1660. He worked briefly as a hosiery merchant, then as an intelligence agent and political writer. His writings resulted in his imprisonment on several occasions, and earned him powerful friends and enemies. During his lifetime Defoe wrote over two hundred and fifty books, pamphlets and journals and travelled widely in both Europe and the British Isles. Among his most famous works are Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1722) and A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). Though Defoe was nearly sixty before he began writing fiction, his work is so fundamental to the development of the novel that he is often cited as the first true English novelist. He is also regarded as a founding father of modern journalism and one of the earliest travel writers. Daniel Defoe died in April 1731.

To mark the publication of Stop What You're Doing and Read This!, a collection of essays celebrating reading, Vintage Classics are releasing 12 limited edition themed ebook 'bundles', to tempt readers to discover and rediscover great books. 
 
LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER 
INTRODUCED BY BLAKE MORRISON 
Clifford Chatterley returns from the First World War as an invalid. Constance nurses him and tries to be the dutiful wife. However, childless and listless she feels oppressed by their marriage and their isolated life. Partly encouraged by Clifford to seek a lover, she embarks on a passionate affair with the gamekeeper, Mellors. Through their liaison Lawrence explores the complications of sex, love and class. Written in 1928 and subsequently banned, Lady Chatterley's Lover is one of the most subversive novels in English literature. 
 
MOLL FLANDERS 
These are the fortunes and misfortunes of Moll Flanders: born in Newgate Prison, twelve years a prostitute, five times a wife (once to her own brother), twelve years a thief and eight years a transported felon in Her Majesty's colony of Virginia. Daniel Defoe's rollicking tale presents life in the prisons, alleyways and underworlds of eighteenth-century London, and gives us Moll - scandalous, unscrupulous and utterly irresistible.

Sons and Lovers

Set in 1900s, this is a lushly descriptive and highly autobiographical portrayal of a young man growing up in class-divided Nottingham

He's an intoxicator, a very great writer, punished by the feminists and their ludicrous opinions. The short stories are among the best in the language. I re-read Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow recently and thought them wonderful... Has there ever been anyone like him for bringing places and people so vividly to life?

Lawrence's masterly portraiture of the human impulse in his fiction had strength and depth...He tore at the rock of life with hand and implement... in Sons and Lovers he fashioned the hard substance of his place and people in memorable ways.

An affecting portrait of a mining family torn apart by class divisions and individual desire at the turn of the century

His fierce love for his mother warring with the need to follow his own desires - analysed with a vigorous relentlessness and pungent imagery - makes this a work whose power stands the test of time

When I was 13 or 14 this was the book I couldn't put down. It's very good teenager territory

His ability to live and write on the hoof never ceases to amaze

Lawrence is tremendously exciting . . . we were all influenced by Lawrence, including the poetry, which is wonderful, and is probably still not enough liked, partly because people call him sexist. He's much more complicated

Lawrence is elegant yet passionate and his imagery is second to none

Daily Express, Simon Shepherd's Six Best Books

'A work whose power stands the test of time' Sunday Times 
 
 Set in 1900s, this is a lushly descriptive and highly autobiographical portrayal of a young man growing up in class-divided Nottingham. 
 
Paul Morel is the focus of his disappointed and fiercely protective mother's life. Their tender, devoted and intense bond comes under strain when Paul falls in love with Miriam Leivers, a local girl his mother disapproves of. The arrival of the provocatively modern Clara Dawes causes further tension and Paul is torn between his individual desires and family allegiances. 
 
Set in a Nottinghamshire mining town at the turn of the twentieth century, this is a powerful portrayal of family and love in all its forms. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY RICHARD EYRE

Women in Love

'Women in Love is a work of genius. It contains characters which are masterpieces of pure creation' New Statesman

What beauties the book contains! There are many pages in it so saturated with warm and lovely intimacies that one reads absorbed

I do not claim to be a literary critic, but I know dirt when I smell it, and here is dirt in heaps- festering, putrid heaps which smell to high Heaven

Lawrence was the first literary artist to emphasise the huge importance of sex as a means of human fulfillment

Its questions about marriage and eroticism, grief and the frightening blankness of nature, have made it one of our century's most popular novels

D H Lawrence (Author) 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. Howard Jacobson (Introducer) Howard Jacobson has written eighteen novels and six works of non-fiction. He won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Award in 2000 for The Mighty Walzer and then again in 2013 for Zoo Time. In 2010 he won the Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question; he was also shortlisted for the prize in 2014 for J.

‘What beauties the book contains! There are many pages in it so saturated with warm and lovely intimacies that one reads absorbed’ Guardian 
 
Women in Love begins one blossoming spring day in England and ends with a terrible catastrophe in the snow of the Alps. Ursula and Gudrun are very different sisters who become entangled with two friends, Rupert and Gerald, who live in their hometown. The bonds between the couples quickly become intense and passionate but whether this passion is creative or destructive is unclear.In this astonishing novel, widely considered to be D.H. Lawrence's best work, he explores what it means to be human in an age of conflict and confusion. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HOWARD JACOBSON

The Rainbow

A novel which chronicles the lines of three generations of the Brangwen family and the emergence of modern England

Lawrence is the most Dostoevskian of English novelists, in whose best work conflicting ideological positions are brought into play and set up against each other in dialogue that is never simply or finally resolved

No writer since Lawrence has been so openly governed by what seems like powerful personal likes and dislikes, grievances, and by what appear to many as untenable prejudices

What astonished me reading it this time round is the iconoclastic modernity of the novel... the sense of daring experiment.. I had entirely forgotten what drastic steps Lawrence was taking with character, for instance. Or with narrative (the novel proceeds cyclically). When this is combined with sexual overtness and a revolutionary call for the individual to achieve "Me-ness" in opposition to the nation, industry and war, we have a book that, appearing as it did in 1915, seemed genuinely disturbing

D H Lawrence (Author) 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. Rachel Cusk (Introducer) Rachel Cusk was born in Canada in 1967 and moved to the United Kingdom in 1974. She is the author of nine novels and three works of non-fiction. She has won and been shortlisted for numerous prizes: Outline (2014) was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Baileys Prize, the Giller Prize and the Canadian Governor General's Award. It was also picked by the New York Times as one of the top ten books of the year. Its follow-up, Transit (2016), was chosen as a book of the year by the Observer, New Statesman, Guardian and Spectator. In 2003, Rachel Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'. In 2015 her version of Euripides’ Medea was put on at the Almeida Theatre with Rupert Goold directing and was shortlisted for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.

A novel which chronicles the lines of three generations of the Brangwen family and the emergence of modern England. 
 
Set between the 1840s and the early years of the twentieth century The Rainbow tells the story of three generations of the Brangwen family, ancient occupiers of Marsh Farm, Nottinghamshire. Through courting, pregnancy, marriage and defiance Lawrence explores love and the conflicts it brings. 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY RACHEL CUSK

Subject of an infamous obscenity trial, Lady Chatterley's Lover is now regarded as one of the pivotal novels of the twentieth century.

Now a major Netflix film starring Emma Corrin and Jack O'Connell, Lady Chatterley's Lover is one of the most pivotal - and controversial - novels of the twentieth century. 
 
Clifford Chatterley returns from the First World War as an invalid. Constance nurses him and tries to be the dutiful wife. However, childless and listless she feels oppressed by their marriage and their isolated life. Partly encouraged by Clifford to seek a lover, she embarks on a passionate affair with the gamekeeper, Mellors. Through their liaison Lawrence explores the complications of sex, love and class. 
 
Written in 1928 and subsequently banned, Lady Chatterley's Lover is one of the most subversive novels in English Literature. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY BLAKE MORRISON

No one ever wrote better about the power struggles of sex and love

Does for D H Lawrence what Jack the Ripper did for Gladstone bags and stovepipe hats

He was a big influence on me - I loved the seriousness and intensity he brought to his studies of human relationships, and the boldness with which he pushed the boundaries of what could be said and thought and written about in the novel

Now a major Netflix film starring Emma Corrin and Jack O'Connell, Lady Chatterley's Lover is one of the most pivotal - and controversial - novels of the twentieth century. 
 
Clifford Chatterley returns from the First World War as an invalid. Constance nurses him and tries to be the dutiful wife. However, childless and listless she feels oppressed by their marriage and their isolated life. Partly encouraged by Clifford to seek a lover, she embarks on a passionate affair with the gamekeeper, Mellors. Through their liaison Lawrence explores the complications of sex, love and class. 
 
Written in 1928 and subsequently banned, Lady Chatterley's Lover is one of the most subversive novels in English Literature. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY BLAKE MORRISON

Collected Stories

Lawrence is known mainly as a novelist and poet but he was also the author of many superb short stories and novellas. By bringing together all his shorter fiction, this volume makes it possible to survey his entire writing career. Together with many celebrated stories - including THE PRUSSIAN OFFICIER, THE VIRGIN AND THE GYPSY, ST MAWR and ODOUR OF CHRYSANTHEMUMS - there are many lesser known but still magnificent pieces which show the extraordinary diversity of Lawrence's talent and also reveal an often forgotten talent for comedy.

Women In Love

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.

The novel is set in post-World War I England and explores themes of love, relationships, sexuality, and gender roles. Ursula and Gudrun are both independent-minded and intelligent women who struggle to find fulfillment in their romantic relationships with Rupert and Gerald, respectively. The men, too, are complex characters who grapple with their own desires and insecurities.As the novel progresses, the characters become embroiled in a web of emotional and sexual tension, leading to tragic consequences. Lawrence's prose is vivid and poetic, and his exploration of human relationships is both profound and thought-provokingThis novel, considered by Lawrence to be his best, centres on the characters of Birkin (a self portrait), Gerald, the son of a colliery owner, and the two women, Gudrun and Ursula

Sons And Lovers

Sons and Lovers is a 1913 novel by the English writer D. H. Lawrence. It traces emotional conflicts through the protagonist, Paul Morel, and his suffocating relationships with a demanding mother and two very different lovers, which exert complex influences on the development of his manhood.

D. H. Lawrence

Doris Lessing

Michael Squires

Paul Poplawski

Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. 
 
Constance Chatterley feels trapped in her sexless marriage to the invalid Sir Clifford. Unable to fulfil his wife emotionally or physically, Clifford encourages her to have a liaison with a man of their own class. But Connie is attracted instead to her husband's gamekeeper and embarks on a passionate affair that brings new life to her stifled existence. Can she find a true equality with Mellors, despite the vast gulf between their positions in society? One of the most controversial novels in English literature, Lady Chatterley's Lover is an erotically charged and psychologically powerful depiction of adult relationships.

D H Lawrence

Books by D H Lawrence

Series by D H Lawrence

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Articles featuring D H Lawrence

Which Penguin books shocked society and became cultural icons? With Jack Edwards and Penguin Editor, Simon Prosser

The book that changed Britain: why the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial still matters 60 years later

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