When the new adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s lover hit Netflix earlier this month, rated R for its strong sexual content and explicit nudity. The costume drama features several long and wild sex scenes between Lady Chatterley (played by Emma Corrin) and Oliver Mellors (actor Jack O’Connell) in which little is left to the imagination.
It is understood that the service stream The story has gone up in tone because, after all, we are in 2022 and sex sells. But the truth is, the original book was no less fiery than the film adaptation made nearly a century later, and far more controversial.
DH Lorenzofamous British author known for his radical and erotically charged works such as Children and Lovers, The Rainbow yes women in lovepublic Lady Chatterley’s lover in 1928. It was his last novel before he died of tuberculosis in 1930, and it would prove to be not only his most controversial title, but also his most important.
As the son of a coal miner from a working-class Nottinghamshire town – and a freethinker since his student days – Lawrence repudiated social norms. This is the mindset that I let flow without brakes Lady Chatterley, an upper-class woman who falls in love with a gardener and has a torrid romance with him. However, it is far from an erotic novel without more. Lawrence used the premise to criticize the rigid class hierarchies that dominated British society – coupled with the era’s rampant industrialization – while arguing much deeper human contact. Her downfall, however, was the graphic scenes in which she detailed female pleasure and used taboo words then considered too salacious for print.
Lawrence published a very limited first edition of the book in 1928 in Italy, where he lived at the time, and a year later in France. Rumors of the book’s illegal content sparked outrage in the UK, US and other parts of mainland Europe, although the redacted versions reached bookstores in the early 1930s in response to popular demand (“The present version naturally omits those passages which, by their use of certain Anglo-Saxon words in bad taste and its blatant treatment of the physical aspects of love, made it impossible to publish Lady Chatterley’s lover in this country in its original form,” the newspaper clarified The New York Times in 1932). Later that year, Polish authorities seized thousands of uncensored copies on their way to Warsaw. Eventually, the books went on sale with several pages removed.
