This annotated edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover includes:
• An original critical afterword on the novel and its obscenity trials
• A detailed biographical essay on the life of D. H. Lawrence
• A note on the texts: the three versions and the 1928 unexpurgated edition
• Historical and literary context on Lawrence’s England and his argument
A volume in CLASSICS OF WORLD LITERATURE from Erato Press.
For thirty years it could not be sold. When Penguin finally published Lady Chatterley’s Lover in full, the British Crown put the book on trial for obscenity — and the prosecutor asked the jury whether it was the kind of novel “you would wish your wife or your servants to read.” The jury said yes, and the verdict helped end literary censorship in England.
This is that book: the complete, unexpurgated 1928 text, exactly as Lawrence wrote it, restored without the cuts that tamed it for decades.
Constance Chatterley is married to a baronet who came home from the war paralysed from the waist down — wealthy, intelligent, and unable to touch her. In the woods of his estate she meets Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper: a man of her husband’s class by education and the working class by birth, contemptuous of the mechanized world she comes from. What grows between them is tender, explicit, and socially unforgivable — a love that crosses every line England drew between bodies, classes, and what could be said aloud.
Lawrence wrote it as a frontal assault. Against the deadness he saw spreading from the coal pits and the factories he set the living body; against a civilization he believed had gone numb he set desire described plainly, in words no respectable novel had dared to print. The scandal was never only the sex. It was the claim that tenderness between two people might matter more than the entire machinery of class and propriety.
This is the literary classic, not a modern romance: Lawrence’s real prose, his philosophy of the body, his England of pits and country houses. For readers of D. H. Lawrence, classic and literary romance, banned books, and the novels that changed what literature was permitted to do.
