Lady Chatterley's Lover

D. H. Lawrence's most controversial novel was published in Florence in 1928 by one of his friends, and in Paris the next year. Because of its overt sexuality and liberal use of four-letter words, Lady Chatterley's Lover was declared obscene and actually went to trial; the complete text did not appear in England until 1960. The novel tells the impassioned story of Lady Constance Chatterley, who is married to Sir Clifford, a wealthy man left a paraplegic after World War I and now an intellectual who ignores her. She finds love and sexual fulfillment—graphically and lyrically described—with her husband's gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. This landmark novel epitomizes Lawrence's belief in the overriding legitimacy of sexual passion as an antidote to the cold and conventional values of a modern industrial society—and, in fact, to the life of the intellect, an attitude that has brought Lawrence as many detractors as admirers. Lady Chatterley's Lover may not be Lawrence's best novel in terms of characterization or subtlety, and—for all the novel's radical sexual realism—the narrative harks back to the novels of the Victorian era. But it is certainly his most notorious work.