1944 Lady Chatterley's Lover

Description

Publishers' Original Binding, With Dustwrapper

A reprint of the first authorised Indian edition. The first authorised Indian edition was published in October 1943, this reprint published in February 1944. The book was later banned in India, and in 1964 the bookseller Ranjit Udeshi was prosecuted for selling an unexpurgated copy.

In the original unclipped and untrimmed dust wrapper.

'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.

Prior owner's ink inscription to the recto to the front endpaper. Price stamp to the title page.