British and American women had just won the right to vote the spirit of liberation was in the air. Lady Chatterley, of course, was far more explicit than previous romantic novels of this kind.īut Lady Chatterley was slightly political, too, and this offended (or perhaps frightened) many conservatives. The novel was not without precedent in erotic literature Fanny Hill had appeared in 1749. Lawrence wrote most of it while in Italy. Tame by today's standards, the book was unorthodox in 1928. Lady Chatterley's Lover is the erotic love story of Constance Chatterley, aristocratic wife of a wheelchair-bound husband, who has an affair with a gamekeeper of their country estate. Even in 1960, few countries seemed ready for the idea of a sexually liberated woman. (The book is still banned in China, where it is a black market item.) The first film version, released about the same time, provoked similar censorship in the United States and around the world. Postal Service, attempted to ban Lady Chatterley's Lover from the mails, following similar action taken in Japan several years earlier. As recently as 1959, puritanical Americans, in the guise of the U.S. Completed in 1928, and first published in Florence (to avoid censorship), what was then considered the most erotic novel ever published in English was inspired by the experiences of an Englishwoman in Taormina, an eastern Sicilian resort town which boasted an emigre population of sophisticated and eccentric Brits.
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