Lady Chatterley's Lover is a novel by English author D. H. Lawrence, first published privately in 1928 in Italy, and in 1929 in France. An unexpurgated edition was not published openly in the United Kingdom until 1960, when it was the subject of a watershed obscenity trial against the publisher Penguin Books. Penguin won the case, and quickly sold 3 million copies.The book was also banned for obscenity in the United States (1929-59), Canada, Australia, India, and Japan. The book soon became notorious for its story of the physical (and emotional) relationship between a working class man and an upper class woman, its explicit descriptions of sex, and its use of then-unprintable (four-letter) words.
The story is said to have originated from certain events in Lawrence's own unhappy domestic life, and he took inspiration for the settings of the book from the county of Nottinghamshire, where he grew up. According to some critics, the fling of Lady Ottoline Morrell with "Tiger", a young stonemason who came to carve plinths for her garden statues, also influenced the story. Lawrence at one time considered calling the novel "Tenderness", and made significant alterations to the text and story in the process of its composition.
The story concerns a young married woman, the former Constance Reid (Lady Chatterley), whose upper class husband, Sir Clifford Chatterley, described as a handsome, well-built man, has been paralysed from the waist down due to a Great War injury. In addition to Clifford's physical limitations, his emotional neglect of Constance forces distance between the couple.
Her emotional frustration leads her into an affair with the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. The class difference between the couple highlights a major motif of the novel which is the unfair dominance of intellectuals over the working class. The novel is about Constance's realisation that she cannot live with the mind alone; she must also be alive physically. This realisation stems from a heightened sexual experience Constance has only felt with Mellors, suggesting that love can only happen with the element of the body, not the mind.
The publication of the book led to a prosecution of Penguin Books under the Obscene Publication Act 1959 who were found not guilty on 2nd November 1960
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