D. H. Lawrence: Before Lady Chatterley's Lover

"What will the others say? That I'm a fool. A collier's son, a poet!"

On 20th October 1960, Penguin Books Limited was tried at the Old Bailey in London for publishing an obscene article. The article was D. H. Lawrence’s final novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, published privately in Italy in 1928, but for the first time in Britain in 1960. The case was the first of its kind under the Obscene Publications Act 1959, a new law that would allow publishers to avoid conviction for obscenity if they could prove the article in question had literary merit.

In 1927, on completion of the novel’s first draft, Lawrence had written:

I’ve done my novel. I like it, but it’s so improper, according to the poor conventional fools, that it will never be printed, and I will not cut it.

But who was D. H. Lawrence? In this introductory biography, we will look at the early life of a self-proclaimed outsider who became one of the most influential and infamous English writers of the twentieth century, from his working-class childhood in Nottinghamshire to his move to London at age twenty-three.