Warning: wikipedia contains spoilers
The story concerns a young married woman whose upper-class husband has been paralysed and rendered impotent. Her sexual frustration leads her into an affair with the gamekeeper, Mellors, eventually culminating in their marriage. The story is said to have originated from events in Lawrence's own unhappy domestic life, and he made significant alterations to the original manuscript in order to make it palatable to readers.
An obscenity trial followed its publication in Britain in 1960 (having been rejected when Lawrence originally took it to publishers in 1930, and eventually published in France). The Obscene Publications Act of 1959, introduced by Roy Jenkins, had made it possible for publishers to escape conviction if they could show that a work was of literary merit.
On November 2, 1960 the British publisher, Penguin Books, won the court case that ensued. A string of expert witnesses, including E. M. Forster, Helen Gardner and Raymond Williams, testified on behalf of the defence.
The outcome of the trial is thought to have been influenced by the famous remark by the prosecuting counsel, Mervyn Griffiths-Jones: "Would you want your wife or servants to read this book?" which reinforced the image of an out-of-touch judiciary.
In chapter 15 there is a passage in which the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, approachs Lady Constance Chatterley from behind "and short and sharp, he took her, short and sharp and finished, like an animal." Even the normally explicit Lawrence does not spell out whether this was vaginal or anal sex, but some events and language in the scene that follows suggests the latter. At the time, even the mention of anal sex was so highly taboo that the very existence of the practice was unknown to many people. There is no way to know how the prosecution interpreted that passage, and or whether the outcome might have been different had Lawrence been explicit.
In Australia, not only was the book itself banned, but a book describing the British trial, "The Trial of Lady Chatterley", was also banned. A copy was smuggled into the country, and then published widely. The fallout from this event eventually led to the virtual abandonment of censorship of books in the country.
In the United States, Lady Chatterley's Lover was one of a trio of books (the others being Tropic of Cancer and Fanny Hill), the ban on which was fought and overturned in court by lawyer Charles Rembar. The free publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover was a significant event in the "sexual revolution." At the time the book was a topic of widespread discussion and a byword of sorts. In 1965, Tom Lehrer recorded a satirical song entitled Smut, in which the speaker in the song lyrics cheerfully acknowledges enjoys his enjoyment of such material; "Who needs a hobby like tennis or philately?/I've got a hobby: rereading Lady Chatterley.
External links
Caution: Australian copyright law protects literary works for only fifty years after the author's death. However, they are still copyrighted in many countries including the United States. If you live in a country where these works are copyrighted, downloading them constitutes copyright infringement.
