Lady Chatterley's Lover Annotated

by D. H. Lawrence

Lady Chatterley's Lover is a novel by English author D. H. Lawrence, first published privately in 1928 in Italy and in 1929 in France. An unexpurgated edition was not published openly in the United Kingdom until 1960, when it was the subject of a watershed obscenity trial against the publisher Penguin Books. Penguin won the case and quickly sold three million copies. The book was also banned for obscenity in the United States, Canada, Australia, India, and Japan. The book soon became notorious for its story of the physical (and emotional) relationship between a working-class man and an upper-class woman, its explicit descriptions of sex, and its use of then-unprintable four-letter words.