Lady Chatterley’s Lover
by D. H. Lawrence
1928
Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) was British novelist D. H. Lawrence’s final and most notorious novel. His previous novels had also been censored to a degree, but Lady Chatterley, with its explicit sex scenes between an aristocratic woman and a working-class gamekeeper, created a colossal scandal in Britain. The country’s publishers would not touch the book, so Lawrence had 1,000 copies privately printed in Italy. These soon sold out, providing much-needed income for the author.
Lawrence was aware that his novel was explosive and calmly stood by Lady Chatterley, declaring that he was “perfectly content” to endure the condemnation of the offended. He did not live to see the publication of an unexpurgated version of the novel, because he died of tuberculosis in 1930, at the age of 44.
