1929 Lady Chatterley's Lover

Description

Early Edition, Rebound

The author's unabridged popular edition of this work, being the second authorised edition. One of three-thousand copies printed.

This is the first edition published in Paris. Lawrence hoped that this edition would discourage piracies, which were rampant. 

'Lady Chatterley's Lover' was a controversial novel when first published in a private edition in Italy in 1928 and France in 1929. An unexpurgated edition was not openly published in the U.K. until 1960, when it was the subject of an important obscenity trial against Penguin Books. The book had been banned due to its obscenity in being sexually explicitly, and for its use of the then-unprintable four-letter words. The romance in the novel was also notorious at the time as it took place between an upper-class woman and a working-class man.

Overall the novel is a love story for the upper-class woman Constance Reid, who is stuck in an unhappy marriage with a paralysed war hero. She begins an affair with the gamekeeper, and is an important commentary on class difference of the time.

This was an important novel of the twentieth century, ushering in the sexual revolution that happened post-World War Two into the 60s and 70s.

'My Skirmish With Jolly Roger' precedes the novel. This was written as Lawrence's response to the pirated editions of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' being published in the States and in Europe. The piracy was rampant for this novel after it was banned for obscenity in many countries, including in the U.K. In this introduction, Lawrence defends the contents of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover'.