Lady Chatterley's Lover

Constance Chatterley, known as Connie, is the young wife of Sir Clifford Chatterley, a baronet paralysed from the waist down in the First World War. At Wragby Hall he withdraws into writing and the management of his mines, and she is left lonely and physically neglected among his cold, intellectual circle.

Connie begins an affair with Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on the estate. Mellors is a former army officer from a working-class family who has pulled away from other people. What begins as a physical relationship deepens into a serious attachment, and Connie cannot reconcile it with what her husband expects of her or with the class she belongs to.

This is a classic English novel of marriage, desire and social division. It is short, direct and often argumentative. Lawrence uses the story to attack an England of machines and rigid class lines, and to defend a life that honours the body alongside the mind.

The book has a history of its own. Lawrence wrote it in Italy, and it was printed privately in Florence in 1928. Britain did not see an uncut edition until Penguin published one in 1960, after a famous obscenity trial. Readers who want a classic written to provoke will find one here.