The celebrated English writer David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) wrote his notorious and "scandalous" novel Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1927 and, totally aware of its controversial contents, he immediately sought the help of his Italian friend Pino Orioli. The novel was published privately in Florence in 1928. Soon after, many attempts were made by the author to have the novel published in England, but to no avail. The rigid English censors had declared war, and a harsh legal battle was waged between them and the author, a battle which  eventually ended in 1960 when, at the end of yet another legal confrontation, the Court decided in favour of Penguin Publishers, and the book was allowed to go in print. On its first day of issue it sold over a million copies!

The controversial element in this celebrated novel has its roots in its own times, particularly as regard the many highly erotic and oft pornographic sexual passages between Lady Chatterely and Oliver Mellors, the game-keeper of her husband Clifford who, confined to a wheelchair after serious injuries sustained in World War I, was rendered an invalid and impotent. Personally, I believe that Lawrence used these erotic passages intentionally, and with sadistic glee, to shock. But there is yet another hard element which highly irked the censors: the fact that an upper class woman had a sexual relationship with just a common worker, and an uncouth one at that, not to mention the controversial Bolshevist ideologies which, at the time, were rapidly infiltrating British mentality and way of life.

But in spite of everything, in spite of the passing time, this novel will shock on and will remain one of the greatest novels ever written, for in its pages the author has laid bare not only himself, but also the crude reality of human frailty and social hypocrisy, which Lawrence continued to fight against until his death in Vance, France, in 1930, at the age of 44.