The first complete edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was published privately by Giuseppe ‘Pino’ Orioli in Florence in 1928. In 1932, two years after D H Lawrence’s death, an expurgated edition was published in London by my old friend Martin Secker, who told me he’d said to the author, ‘I’ll do my best.’ And he did. Instead of reconstituting the book, as would be demanded by censorious publishers today, Secker used asterisks to indicate where excisions had been made. What happened thereafter, right up to the present day, forms the substance of this survey by Guy Cuthbertson.

Unsurprisingly, Lady C is replete with drama and farce. We learn that the novel’s passionate admirers included W B Yeats, Philip Larkin, Hermann Hesse, Stevie Smith, Norman Mailer, Anaïs Nin, Tennessee Williams, E M Forster, Madonna and David Bowie. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath revered it; for Plath, Hughes became a Mellors-gamekeeper fantasy. The haters included Evelyn Waugh, Edith Sitwell, W H Auden and Enid Blyton. F R Leavis did not admit the novel into the Lawrentian canon because, as Cuthbertson perceptively observes, it ‘was a book Leavis was not in control of’. T E Lawrence delivered the classic dismissal of those who can’t cope with Eros at all: ‘Surely the sex business isn’t worth all this damned fuss?’ 

An uncensored edition was published by the Grove Press in 1959 in the USA and by Penguin in 1960 in the UK. Both publishers won prosecutions against them for obscenity. The case of Penguin, the world’s most famous publisher, became a cause célèbre but its outlets across the Commonwealth by