novel by Lawrence
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Written by
Sarah Dillon
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The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Last Updated: •Article History
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, novel by D. H. Lawrence, published in a limited English-language edition in Florence (1928) and in Paris (1929). It was first published in England in an expurgated version in 1932. The full text was published only in 1959 in New York City and in 1960 in London, when it was the subject of a landmark obscenity trial (Regina v. Penguin Books, Ltd.) that turned largely on the justification of the use in the novel of until-then taboo sexual terms. This last of Lawrence’s novels reflects the author’s belief that men and women must overcome the deadening restrictions of industrialized society and follow their natural instincts to passionate love.
Summary
As a result of the controveries and litigation around its publication, Lady Chatterley’s Lover is widely known for its explicit descriptions of sexual intercourse. These occur in the context of a plot that centers on Lady Constance Chatterley and her unsatisfying marriage to Sir Clifford, a wealthy Midlands landowner, writer, and intellectual. Constance enters into a passionate love affair with her husband’s educated gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. Pregnant by him, she leaves her husband, and the novel ends with Mellors and Constance temporarily separated in the hope of securing divorces in order to begin a new life together.
Britannica QuizFamous Novels, First Lines QuizPublication history and analysis
The publication history of Lady Chatterley’s Lover provides a plot itself worthy of a novel. Lawrence had already faced censorship with his 1915 novel The Rainbow, one reason Lawrence cited for leaving England after the end of World War I made it possible to do so. Published privately in 1928 and long available in foreign editions, the first unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover did not appear in England until Penguin risked publishing it in 1960, a year after Grove Press published it in 1959 in the United States. Lawrence had died in 1930, and it was his widow, Frieda, who championed the book for decades before finding willing publishers for Lawrence’s complete, uncensored manuscript.
Grove successfully sued when the U.S. Post Office seized copies of its edition on the grounds that the material was obscene and therefore contraband; reviewing the matter, a federal judge ruled instead that Lawrence’s work was of literary merit and that banning it “would be inimical to a free society.” Grove followed with suits that cleared the way for the unimpeded sale of other books deemed obscene, among them Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, Penguin was acquitted in the U.K. after a notorious trial, in which many eminent authors of the day appeared as witnesses for the defense.
What remains so powerful and so unusual about Lady Chatterley’s Lover is not just its honesty about the power of the sexual bond between a man and a woman, but the fact that, even in the early years of the 21st century, it remains one of the few novels in English literary history that addresses female sexual desire. It is also a sustained and profound reflection on the state of modern society and the threat to culture and humanity of the unceasing tide of industrialization and capitalism, both constant themes in Lawrence’s work.
Sarah Dillon The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
