"LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER"(Witer D.H.LAWRENCE):D. H. Lawrence's uncompromisingly candid novel deals in poetic and sexually explicit language with the passionate relationship between Lady Constance Chatterley and her husband's forthright and powerfully mascu- line gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. Trapped in a marriage which has become sterile and joyless since her husband's return from the trenches of the First World War partially paralysed and confined to a wheelchair, Connie seizes the chance of sexual fulfilment she had thought lost to her for ever.

With its four-letter words and its explicit descriptions Of sexual intercourse Lady Chatterley's Lover is the novel with which D. H. Lawrence is mosl often associated. First published privately in Florence in 1928, it became world-wide best-seller when Penguin Books successfully resisted an attempl by the British Director of Public Prosecutions to prevent them publishing ar unexpurgated edition. The famous 'Lady Chatterley trial' heralded the sexua revolution of the coming decades and signalled the defeat of Establishmenl prudery.

Yet Lawrence himself was hardly a liberationist and the conservatism many aspects of his novel would later lay it open to attacks from the politica avant-garde and from feminists. The story of how the wife of Sir Clifford Chatterley responds when her husband returns from the war paralysed from the waist down, and of the tender love which then develops between her and her husband's gamekeeper, is complex and open to a variety of conflictin interpretations.

This edition of the novel offers an occasion for a new generation oreaders to discover what all the fuss was about; to appraise Lawrence's bitter indictment of modern industrial society, and to ask themselves what lessons there might be for the 21st century in his intense exploration of the comolicated relations between love and sex.