With its four-letter words and its explicit descriptions of sexual intercours Lady Chatterley's Lover is the novel with which Г). II. Lawrence is mo often associated. First published privately in Florence in 1928, it became world-wide best-seller when Penguin Books successfully resisted an attem by the British Director of Public Prosecutions to prevent them publishing a unexpurgated edition. The famous 'Ladv Ghatterley trial' heralded the sexu| revolution of the coming decades and signalled the defeat of Establishmei prudery. . .Yet Lawrence himself was hardly a liberationist and the conservatism < many aspects of his novel would later lay it open to attacks from the politic avant-garde and from feminists. The story of how the wife of Sir Cliffoi Chatterley responds when her husband returns from the war paralysed froi the waist down, and of the tender love which then develops between her an her husband's gamekeeper, is complex and open to a variety of eonflictii] interpretations. . .This edition of the novel offers an occasion for a new generation readers to discover what all the fuss was about; to appraise Lawrencej bitter indictment of modern industrial society, and to ask themselves wh; lessons there might be for the 21st century in his intense exploration of tl complicated relations between love and sex. .
