SOURCE: Bowlby, Rachel. “‘But She Would Learn Something from Lady Chatterley’: The Obscene Side of the Canon.” In Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of Twentieth-Century ‘British’ Literary Canons, edited by Karen R. Lawrence, pp. 113-35. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Bowlby discusses the British 1960 censorship trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence, along with its literary reception, in the context of a history of British censorship.

Modern British Literature, the final volume of The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, includes a long extract—nine pages, almost the whole essay—from D. H. Lawrence's “Pornography and Obscenity.” This could be cited as one of many pieces of evidence for the contemporary stature of Lawrence, the kind of writer whose auxiliary publications are considered canonical; and the essay's subject matter might be seen as an allusion to the particularly violent curbs Lawrence's works faced (among...