Lady Chatterley’s Lover

First published privately in Florence in 1928, it only became a worldwide bestseller after Penguin Books had successfully resisted an attempt by the British Director of Public Prosecutions to prevent them offering an unexpurgated edition. The famous Lady Chatterley trial heralded the sexual revolution of the coming decades and signaled the defeat of Establishment prudery. Yet, Lawrence himself was hardly a liberationist and the conservativism of many aspects of his novel would later lay it open to attacks from the political avantgarde and from feminists. The story of how the wife of Sir Clifford Chatterley responds when her husband returns from the war paralyzed from the waist down, and of the tender love which then develops between her and her husbands gamekeeper is a complex one, open to a variety of conflicting interpretations.