LoveReading Says
This new ABRIDGED AUDIO edition is published in celebration of the 50th anniversary of
Penguin's courtcase win of one of the most controversial novels in
English literature. Lady Chatterley's Lover is an erotically
charged and psychologically powerful depiction of adult relationships.
In 1960, Penguin Books were prosecuted when they tried to publish the
novel in this its unexpurgated form for the first time. What followed
was the most talked-about obscenity trial of the twentieth century,
which resulted in a 'not guilty' verdict. Penguin's successful defence
of the book's literary merit was a victory of free speech, and made
Lawrence's story of the affair between a married woman and her
gamekeeper an instant bestseller.
Click here to listen to an interview with Maxine Peake, the narrator of this audiobook.
Abridged audiobook edition.
Read by Maxine Peake.
4 CDs
Approximate running time: 5 hours
This title is also available as an unabridged audiobook. Click here to find out more.
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Lady Chatterley's Lover : Abridged Audiobook Synopsis
Explicit descriptions of sex and 'unprintable' words meant that D.H. Lawrence's notorious novel could only be printed in Florence when it was published in 1928. Lady Chatterley's Lover was finally published openly in the United Kingdom in 1960. Almost entitled Tenderness by the author, it tells the story of the physical relationship between the aristocratic protagonist Constance Chatterley and gamekeeper Oliver Mellors - which occurs right under the nose of her wheelchair-bound husband, Clifford. In exploring the class system of the early 20th century, the novel also touches upon the declining coal mining industry: its effect on the workers; and the politics which surrounded it. Yet possibly the most important theme in this intimate and moving novel is the individual's need for physical as well as intellectual satisfaction in order to feel a sense of completeness.
About This Edition
About D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Lawrence was born into a miner’s family in
Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, in 1885, the fourth of five children. He
attended Beauvale Board School and Nottingham High School, and trained
as an elementary schoolteacher at Nottingham University College. He
taught in Croydon from 1908. His first novel, The White Peacock,
was published in 1911, just a few weeks after the death of his mother to
whom he had been extraordinarily close. His career as a schoolteacher
was ended by serious illness at the end of 1911.
In 1912 Lawrence
went to Germany with Frieda Weekley, the German wife of the Professor
of Modern Languages at the University College of Nottingham. They were
married on their return to England in 1914. Lawrence had published Sons and Lovers in 1913; but The Rainbow, completed in 1915, was suppressed, and for three years he could not find a publisher for Women in Love, completed in 1917.
After
the war, Lawrence lived abroad, and sought a more fulfilling mode of
life than he had so far experienced. With Frieda, he lived in Sicily,
Sri Lanka, Australia, New Mexico and Mexico. They returned to Europe in
1925. His last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, was published in
1928 but was banned in England and America. In 1930 he died in Vence, in
the south of France, at the age of forty-four.
Lawrence’s life
may have been short, but he lived it intensely. He also produced an
amazing body of work; novels, stories, poems, plays, essays, travel
books, translations, paintings and letters (over five thousand of which
survive). After his death Frieda wrote that, ‘What he had seen and felt
and known he gave in his writing to his fellow men, the splendour of
living, the hope of more and more life … a heroic and immeasureable
gift.’
More About D. H. Lawrence
