Lady Chatterley’s Lover: Introduction by John Sutherland

Famously banned for indecency, Lawrence’s final novel is one of the most notorious and passionate love stories in literature.

Constance Reid, Lady Chatterley, is a young woman trapped in an unfulfilling marriage to an aristocrat whose war wounds have left him paralyzed. After her husband demands that she provide him with an heir, she enters into a liaison with their gamekeeper, a working-class man named Oliver Mellors. As their illicit relationship grows in tenderness, mutual respect, and sensual passion, Constance discovers that true fulfillment requires a real connection of both mind and body. Shocking to its original audience for its cross-class romance as well as for its explicit depictions of sex, the novel has long been hailed as the summit of Lawrence’s artistic achievement and one of the most influential novels of the twentieth century.

D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE (1885-1930), the prolific novelist, poet, and travel writer, was born in Nottinghamshire, England. The son of a miner, he attended Nottingham University and first found employment as a schoolteacher. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1911, and the next year he published Sons and Lovers and ran off to Germany with Frieda Weekley, his former tutor’s wife, whom he later married. His masterpieces The Rainbow and Women in Love were completed in quick succession, but the first was suppressed as indecent and the second was not published until 1920. In 1928 Lawrence’s final novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, was banned in England and the United States for indecency. He died of tuberculosis in 1930 in Venice.

ABOUT THE INTRODUCER: John Sutherland is a British academic, newspaper columnist, and author. He is Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London. He has twice served as a judge for the Booker Prize and writes regularly for The Guardian.