Description

Lady Chatterley's Lover is D. H. Lawrence's final novel, first published in 1928 in Italy and 1929 in France. Obscenity led to the book's outlawing in the United States, Canada, Australia, India, and Japan, but it entered the public domain in 2024. Lawrence's life, including his wife, Frieda, and childhood in Nottinghamshire, inspired the novel. Constance Reid (Lady Chatterley) is the central character of the novel. Her husband, Sir Clifford Chatterley, a baronet from the upper class, is paralyzed from the waist down due to a Great War injury. Constance is having an affair with Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper.

Lawrence's opinions and artistic preferences earned him a controversial reputation; he endured contemporary persecution and public misrepresentation of his creative work throughout his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile that he described as a "savage enough pilgrimage.". At the time of his death, he had been variously scorned as tasteless, avant-garde, and a pornographer who had only garnered success for erotica; however, English novelist and critic E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation". Later, English literary critic F. R. Leavis also championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness.