By D H Lawrence

Lady Chatterley's Lover:

Lady Chatterley’s Lover is one of the most notorious of books. It scandalised the society into which it was published in 1928, with its open discussion of sex and sexuality and the unabashed descriptions not only of the act of making love but of the joys and pleasures to be had from the true appreciation of the penis and what Lawrence firmly called the cunt.

The story of Lady Chatterley and her love for her husband’s gamekeeper outraged the sensibilities of Edwardian England. Lawrence had already been dismissed as a purveyor of the obscene for the attitudes to sex that he had shown in The Rainbow which had been fiercely suppressed on its publication in 1915. Chatterley, written in several versions around 1928 in Italy in the final part of Lawrence’s life was a deliberate choice on the author’s part to address sex head on, describe the act and its pleasures in detail and put forward his belief that mankind had lost touch with its pagan and natural root, its link to the earth and therefore its strength. Lawrentian sex although tender and loving is feral and robust. He despised what he called “the miserable sodding rutters, the flaming sods, the sniveling, dribbling, dithering, palsied, pulse-less lot that make up England today”.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned from publication in Britain until 1960 when the radical new publishing house Penguin Books brought out a paperback edition and was immediately taken to court for obscenity. The trial that followed became one of the marking posts for the sixties ‘revolution’ with the arguments for the beauty of Lawrence’s descriptions of love and sex, chiefly argued by defence witnesses such as Richard Hoggart and E M Forster, finally conquering the prudish sensibilities that Lawrence so despised and leading to a landmark legal ruling in Penguin’s favour. One of the famed highlights of the trial was the total silencing of the stuffy prosecution QC by Hoggart as he explained to him how sad it was that the lawyer had never had a woman hold his balls.

However, for all the campaigning and crusading that has accompanied Lady Chatterley’s Lover it remains in essence a beautiful description of a true and lasting passion.