Novel
Lady Chatterley's Lover
D. H. Lawrence · 1928
Opening lines
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes.
Text quoted from gutenberg.net.au
Synopsis
Clifford Chatterley returns from the war paralysed from the hips down and settles at Wragby, near a mine that he owns; he writes stories, then turns to his business affairs. His wife, Connie, runs the house, receives her husband's intellectual friends and is bored; one day he suggests that she have another man's child to give him an heir, provided he is a suitable man. She crosses the park, stops in front of the gamekeeper's hut and sees him washing outside, bare-chested.
Context
Three versions were written in Italy by a man suffering from tuberculosis. He had the third printed privately, by subscription, in Florence, by typographers who did not know English: the proofs were terrible, and he wrote that the printer held out for a few pages and then got drunk, or something like that. The red cover bore a black phoenix. An expurgated edition appeared in England in 1932, two years after his death, and the full text twenty-eight years later, from a paperback publisher that was promptly prosecuted. The prosecutor asked the jurors whether they would let their wife or their servants read such a book, and the courtroom laughed.
Who it is for
More than five hundred pages in the annotated paperback edition; translated into French as early as 1932, with a preface by André Malraux.
Prizes and reception
Acquitted in 1960 after six days of hearings, it sold two hundred thousand copies on the day it went on sale, then three million.
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