Lady Chatterley's Lover Illustrated

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 three million copies. The book was also banned for obscenity in the United States, 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 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, who at one time considered calling the novel John Thomas and Lady Jane (in reference to the male and female sex organs), made significant alterations to the text and story in the process of its composition. Lawrence read the manuscript of Maurice by E. M. Forster, which was published posthumously in 1971. That novel, which also involves a gamekeeper becoming the lover of a member of the upper classes, although the relationship is homosexual, was an influence on Lady Chatterley's Lover.

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