Lady Chatterley's Lover Format: MassMarket

THE AUTHORIZED UNEXPURGATED EDITION—Lady Chatterley’s Lover is one of the most beautiful and most notorious love stories in modern fiction.

The Signet Classics edition is D. H. Lawrence’s masterpiece just as he wrote it. It is the complete unexpurgated text of the original Orioli edition first published in Italy in 1928, the last approved by Lawrence himself.

The summation of D. H. Lawrence’s artistic achievement, this controversial novel about an upper-class woman stifled by a loveless marriage who begins a passionate affair with her husband’s gamekeeper sharply illustrates Lawrence’s belief that materialism robbed life of its vitality and purpose...that tenderness and passion were the only weapons that could save man from self-destruction. 


“This Signet Classics edition is the only complete unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover authorized by the estate of Frieda Lawrence for U.S. publication. No other edition is entitled to make this claim.”—Laurence Pollinger, Literary Executor to the Estate of Mrs. Frieda Lawrence

The son of a miner, the prolific novelist, poet, and travel writer David Herbert Lawrence was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, in 1885. He attended Nottingham University and found employment as a schoolteacher. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1911, the same year his beloved mother died and he quit teaching after contracting pneumonia. The next year Lawrence published Sons and Lovers and ran off to Germany with Frieda Weekley, his former tutor’s wife. His masterpieces The Rainbow and Women in Love were completed in quick succession, but the first was suppressed as indecent and the second was not published until 1920. Lawrence’s lyrical writings challenged convention, promoting a return to an ideal of nature where sex is seen as a sacrament. In 1928 Lawrence’s final novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, was banned in England and the United States for indecency. He died of tuberculosis in 1930 in Venice.