Famously the subject of a court case, Lawrence’s final novel is one of the most notorious and passionate love stories in literature. In the bleak aftermath of World War I, Constance, Lady Chatterley, is a young woman trapped in an unfulfilling marriage to an aristocrat whose war wounds have left him paralysed. With her husband’s encouragement, she enters into a liaison with Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on their country estate in Nottinghamshire. As this illicit relationship grows into tenderness, mutual respect and sensual passion, Constance discovers that true fulfilment requires a real connection of both mind and body. Lady Chatterley’s Lover shocked its original audience with its vindication of adulterous love across the class divide as well as its explicit descriptions of sex. It retains its power today as a hymn to erotic love and as an impassioned treatise on ‘tender-hearted fucking’ as a means to salvation from the horrors of war and the sterility of modern life. It is all the more poignant that Lawrence wrote this book – three times over – while he was dying from tuberculosis. The modern world was not interested in its salvation. Lawrence had Lady Chatterley privately printed in Italy in 1928, but strict obscenity laws in the UK rendered it unpublishable there for more than thirty years.
