In this novel, D. H. Lawrence pioneered in fearlessly and frankly describing the act of love. He wrote of physical love with a total lack of inhibition or convention (even to the use of certain four-letter words) but he combined that with lyrical tenderness, joy, and exultation that became, at times, almost religious. He successfully conveyed what others at that time (1928) could only hint at — the white-hot radiance of sexual passion.
Not only was this creative man a novelist and poet but he was also an artist, and the Greenwich House Classics Library is pleased to present in this special edition the controversial erotic paintings that Lawrence exhibited in London in 1929. That gallery show was subsequently closed by the police because of the public shock and outcry, but the paintings, which were intended as a celebration of the human body, have great strength and interest.
This version of Lady Chatterley's Lover, banned in this country until 1959, was the first complete, authorized, and unexpurgated form of Lawrence's finest and most famous novel. Earlier editions that circulated here were heavily bowdlerized or abridged. In this version, however, readers could appreciate to the fullest not only Lawrence's lyrical style and natural vitality but also his explicit rendering of sexual love scenes.
It is the story of Constance Chatterley, whose husband Clifford is paralyzed emotionally and physically, and of the growing romance between Lady Chatterley and her husband's gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, with whom she finds love and sexual fulfillment and learns to reject the sterility, joylessness, and class consciousness of Clifford and his way of life. In this novel, as elsewhere, the author vividly portrays English provincial life, its economic hardships, class conflicts, and pastoral beauty in the process of erosion by industrialization.
In Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence—revolutionary poet of desire—has created one of the most tender, poignant and liberated love stories of all time.
With a Foreword by Moreland Perkins
Illustrated with the Controversial Erotic Paintings of D.H. Lawrence
About the Author
David Herbert Lawrence was born on 11th September 1885 in Eastwood, a small mining village in Nottinghamshire, in the English Midlands. Despite ill health as a child and a comparatively disadvantageous position in society, he became a teacher in 1908, and took up a post at a school in Croydon, London. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1910, and from then until his death he wrote feverishly, producing poetry, essays, plays, travel books, short stories, and eleven more novels, including The Rainbow, Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence travelled widely, settling for periods in Italy, New Mexico and Mexico. He married Frieda Weekley in 1914 and died of tuberculosis in 1930.
