Books

8vo. Brown half morocco, pebbled cloth boards, top edges gilt, others untrimmed. First edition, number 670 of 1000 copies signed by the author. "Mr. Lawrence has moments of greatness, of course, but hours of something very different" Virginia Woolf ('The Common Reader'). "Lawrence fully intended to shock and expected his book to be banned. The time-bomb only recently exploded when the issue of the trial ended censorship in England. Even without the eroticism it is a fascinating and well-planned novel rich in post-war observations and character portrait" (Connolly, The Modern Movement, 57). Roberts A42a. A fine copy.

Lady Chatterley's Lover is a novel by D. H. Lawrence, first published privately in 1928 in Italy and in 1929 in France. It portrays a young married woman, Constance Reid (Lady Chatterley), whose upper-class barrister husband has been paralyzed and rendered impotent. Her sexual frustration leads her into an affair with the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. The class difference between the couple highlights a major motif of the novel which is the unfair dominance of intellectuals over the working class. The book is a meditation on the necessity for a balance between the body and the mind and the destructive effects that industrialization and modernization can have on both.