Lady Chatterley's Lover

Lawrence wrote the novel three times over, at the Villa Mirenda outside Florence between 1926 and 1928. The first version was published after his death as The First Lady Chatterley (1944); the second as John Thomas and Lady Jane (1972), a title he had once considered for the book itself. The third version is the novel as published — and no commercial publisher in London or New York would publish it as written.

So Lawrence became his own publisher. Through the Florentine bookseller Giuseppe Orioli he had 1,000 numbered, signed copies printed at the Tipografia Giuntina in July 1928, sold by subscription at £2, with the phoenix device stamped on mulberry-coloured boards. The edition sold out despite seizures in the post, and made him more money than anything he had written. It also made him a target: photographic piracies of the book appeared within months in America and Europe, priced high, paying him nothing.

That is what brought him to Paris in March 1929. He asked Sylvia Beach to publish a cheap authorized edition; she declined — she did not admire the book, and did not want Shakespeare and Company known as a publisher of erotica. The deal went instead to Edward Titus, the American bookseller-publisher at the Sign of the Black Manikin, 4 rue Delambre in Montparnasse. Lawrence's letter of 5 April 1929 set the terms: 3,000 copies at 60 francs, profits split. The Paris "Popular Edition" appeared within weeks, carrying a new introduction written for it, "My Skirmish with Jolly Roger" — Lawrence's account of the piracy war, later expanded into the essay "A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover." The imprint named no publisher at all: just "Privately Printed, 1929."

Britain and America read the book censored for a generation. The authorized 1932 editions from Martin Secker and Alfred A. Knopf were heavily expurgated. The full text became legal in America in 1959, when a federal court struck down the Post Office's mail ban on Grove Press's edition, and in Britain on 2 November 1960, when an Old Bailey jury acquitted Penguin Books under the new Obscene Publications Act. Penguin's 200,000-copy printing sold out on its first day.

Constance Reid marries Sir Clifford Chatterley in 1917, while he is home on leave; he returns to Flanders and is shipped back, in the novel's phrase, more or less in bits. Paralysed from the waist down, he settles at Wragby Hall, his seat in the coal-mining Midlands, and turns himself first into a fashionable writer and then into a hard-headed director of his collieries. Connie runs the house, listens to the talk of Clifford's intellectual guests, drifts into a brief unsatisfying affair with the playwright Michaelis, and slowly comes apart — until her sister and father insist she take exercise, and her walks begin to pass the gamekeeper's hut in the wood.

Oliver Mellors is the keeper: a collier's son who rose to lieutenant in India and came back to the woods, separated from a wife he cannot legally shed. The affair begins in the hut and grows over the spring and summer, chapter by chapter, in scenes whose sexual explicitness — and whose vocabulary — kept the full text unpublishable in Britain for thirty-two years. Around the wood, the novel keeps returning to Tevershall pit-village and the industrial Midlands, blotting out, as Lawrence writes, the agricultural England.