Books

"Lady Chatterley's Lover" by D.H. Lawrence. Florence: privately printed [verso of title: by the Tipografia Giuntina], 1928. 'Second edition, limited to 200 copies' (i.e. first edition, cheap-paper issue), square 8vo, contemporary black cloth, [4] 365 pp., original wrappers bound in, browning (stronger in margins), pencilled marginalia and underlining, a few closed marginal tears, pp. 207/8 loose. Rare.

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.