"Complete and unexpurgated" edition: Lady Chatterley's Lover is the final novel by English author D. H. Lawrence, which was first published privately in 1928, in Florence, Italy, and in 1929, in Paris, France.

The book soon became notorious for its story of the physical (and emotional) relationship between a working-class man and an upper-class woman, its explicit descriptions of sex and its use of then-unprintable profane words.

[4] According to some critics, the fling of Lady Ottoline Morrell with "Tiger", a young stonemason who came to carve plinths for her garden statues, also influenced the story.

[5] Lawrence, who had once considered calling the novel John Thomas and Lady Jane in reference to the male and the female sex organs, made significant alterations to the text and story in the process of its composition.

That realisation stems from a heightened sexual experience that Constance has felt only with Mellors, suggesting that love requires the elements of both body and mind.

Involved with hard, dangerous and health-threatening employment, the unionised and self-supporting pit-village communities in Britain have been home to more pervasive class barriers than has been the case in other industries (for an example, see chapter 2 of The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell.)

Coal mining is a recurrent and familiar theme in Lawrence's life and writing because of his background, and it is prominent also in Sons and Lovers and Women in Love and short stories such as Odour of Chrysanthemums.

A publisher's note in the 2001 Random House Inc. edition of the novel states that Lawrence "was unable to secure a commercial publication [of] the novel in its unexpurgated form".

Reviewing it in The Observer, the journalist Gerald Gould noted that "passages are necessarily omitted to which the author undoubtedly attached supreme psychological importance—importance so great, that he was willing to face obloquy and misunderstanding and censorship because of them".

In November 1960, the full unexpurgated edition, the last of three versions written by Lawrence,[20] was published by Penguin Books in Britain, selling its first print run of 200,000 copies on the first day of publication.

The 1959 Act, introduced by Roy Jenkins, had made it possible for publishers to escape conviction if they could show that a work was of literary merit.

Various academic critics and experts of diverse kinds, including E. M. Forster, Helen Gardner, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and Norman St John-Stevas, were called as witnesses.

The verdict, delivered on 2 November 1960, was "not guilty" and resulted in a far greater degree of freedom for publishing explicit material in the United Kingdom.

The prosecution was ridiculed for being out of touch with changing social norms when the chief prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, asked if it was the kind of book "you would wish your wife or servants to read".

This edition is therefore dedicated to the twelve jurors, three women and nine men, who returned a verdict of 'not guilty' and thus made D. H. Lawrence's last novel available for the first time to the public in the United Kingdom".

The ban by the Department of Customs and Excise on Lady Chatterley's Lover, along with three other books—Borstal Boy, Confessions of a Spent Youth, and Lolita—was lifted in July 1965.

In 1962, McGill University Professor of Law and Canadian modernist poet F. R. Scott appeared before the Supreme Court of Canada to defend Lady Chatterley's Lover from censorship.

[31] On 15 November 1960, an Ontario panel of experts, appointed by Attorney General Kelso Roberts, found that novel was not obscene according to the Canadian Criminal Code.

In 1930, Senator Bronson Cutting proposed an amendment to the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act, which was being debated, to end the practice of having U.S. Customs censor allegedly obscene imported books.

"[33] A 1955 French film version, based on the novel and released by Kingsley Pictures, was the subject of attempted censorship in New York in 1959 on the grounds that it promoted adultery.

[35] The ban on Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer and Fanny Hill was fought and overturned in court with assistance by publisher Barney Rosset and lawyer Charles Rembar in 1959.

[36] It was then published by Rosset's Grove Press, with the complete opinion by United States Court of Appeals Judge Frederick van Pelt Bryan, which first established the standard of "redeeming social or literary value" as a defence against obscenity charges.

[38] The publication of a full translation of Lady Chatterley's Lover by Sei Itō in 1950 led to a famous obscenity trial in Japan that extended from 8 May 1951 to 18 January 1952, with appeals lasting to 13 March 1957.

In 1964, the bookseller Ranjit Udeshi in Bombay was prosecuted under Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code (sale of obscene books)[39] for selling an unexpurgated copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Ranjit D. Udeshi v. State of Maharashtra (AIR 1965 SC 881) was eventually laid before a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India.

[40] The court upheld the conviction: When everything said in its favour we find that in treating with sex the impugned portions viewed separately and also in the setting of the whole book pass the permissible limits judged of from our community standards and as there is no social gain to us which can be said to preponderate, we must hold the book to satisfy the test we have indicated above.In the United States, the full publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover was a significant event in the "sexual revolution".

The British poet Philip Larkin's poem "Annus Mirabilis" begins with a reference to the trial: Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me) – Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban And the Beatles' first LP.

Introducing it, Ernie explained that his play "concerns a rich, titled young lady who is deprived of love, caused by her husband falling into a combine harvester, which unfortunately makes him impudent".

Despite her attempts to obtain the copyright for Harte to have his play staged in the 1950s, Baron Philippe de Rothschild did not relinquish the dramatic rights until his film version was released in France.

Only the Old Bailey trial against Penguin Books for alleged obscenity in publishing the unexpurgated paperback edition of the novel prevented the play's transfer to the much bigger Wyndham's Theatre, for which it had already been licensed by the Lord Chamberlain's Office on 12 August 1960 with passages censored.