Lady Chatterley's Lover

What Lady Chatterley's Lover is about

Constance Chatterley is married to Sir Clifford, a mine owner and writer who came home from the First World War paralysed from the waist down. Living at Wragby Hall in the industrial Midlands, among the coal pits of Tevershall, she feels her life draining away in a marriage of talk without touch. She begins an affair with Oliver Mellors, the estate's gamekeeper, a former soldier from a mining family who has withdrawn from the world. The novel follows their relationship and Connie's growing resolve to leave her husband and her class.

Lawrence meant the book as an argument about the whole of modern England: against industry, class and the mind cut off from the body, and for physical tenderness. He described sex directly and used words that were then unprintable, which is what made it notorious.

The ban, in full

No publisher would issue the book openly, so Lawrence had it printed privately in Florence in 1928. Pirated editions spread, and customs officers in Britain and the US seized copies. For thirty years only expurgated versions could be sold legally in either country.

In the United States, Grove Press published the full text in 1959. The Postmaster General banned it from the mails as obscene; a federal judge overturned that decision in July 1959, and the appeals court agreed in 1960.

In Britain, the new Obscene Publications Act 1959 allowed a defence of literary merit, and Penguin Books decided to test it by announcing an unexpurgated paperback. The trial, R v Penguin Books Ltd, was held at the Old Bailey in October and November 1960. The defence called 35 witnesses, among them E. M. Forster, Rebecca West, Richard Hoggart and the Bishop of Woolwich. The prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, became famous for asking the jury whether this was a book "you would even wish your wife or your servants to read". On 2 November 1960 the jury found Penguin not guilty. Hundreds of thousands of copies sold on the first day of sale, and millions within a year; Penguin's second edition was dedicated to the jurors.

Other countries kept their bans longer. India's Supreme Court upheld a bookseller's obscenity conviction over the book in 1964, and in Japan the translator and publisher of the full text were convicted in a 1957 case that went to the Supreme Court.

About D. H. Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence (1885–1930) was the son of a coal miner from Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, the world he wrote about in Sons and Lovers. He was used to censorship long before Lady Chatterley: in 1915 his novel The Rainbow was prosecuted and over a thousand copies were destroyed, and in 1929 police seized an exhibition of his paintings in London. He wrote three versions of Lady Chatterley in his last years, while dying of tuberculosis, and died in France in 1930, thirty years before the trial.

Which edition to read

Any edition from 1960 onward that says "unexpurgated" has the full third version, the one Lawrence published. The earlier versions have been published separately as The First Lady Chatterley and John Thomas and Lady Jane.

Questions

Why was Lady Chatterley's Lover banned?

For obscenity: its explicit sex scenes and four-letter words, and, many said at the time, a lady's affair with a working man.

Is it still banned anywhere?

It has been freely sold in Britain and the US since 1960. More: books banned in the United Kingdom, books tried in court.