Stop What You’re Doing and Read…Banned Books: Lady Chatterley's Lover & Moll Flanders

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Summary

To mark the publication of Stop What You're Doing and Read This!, a collection of essays celebrating reading, Vintage Classics are releasing 12 limited edition themed ebook 'bundles', to tempt readers to discover and rediscover great books.

LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER
INTRODUCED BY BLAKE MORRISON
Clifford Chatterley returns from the First World War as an invalid. Constance nurses him and tries to be the dutiful wife. However, childless and listless she feels oppressed by their marriage and their isolated life. Partly encouraged by Clifford to seek a lover, she embarks on a passionate affair with the gamekeeper, Mellors. Through their liaison Lawrence explores the complications of sex, love and class. Written in 1928 and subsequently banned, Lady Chatterley's Lover is one of the most subversive novels in English literature.

MOLL FLANDERS
These are the fortunes and misfortunes of Moll Flanders: born in Newgate Prison, twelve years a prostitute, five times a wife (once to her own brother), twelve years a thief and eight years a transported felon in Her Majesty's colony of Virginia. Daniel Defoe's rollicking tale presents life in the prisons, alleyways and underworlds of eighteenth-century London, and gives us Moll - scandalous, unscrupulous and utterly irresistible.

Reviews

LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER - No one ever wrote better about the power struggles of sex and love
Doris Lessing

About the authors

D H Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence was born 11 September 1885 in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire. His father was a miner and his mother was a schoolteacher. In 1906 he took up a scholarship at Nottingham University to study to be a teacher. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1911. Lawrence gave up teaching in 1911 due to illness. In 1912 he met and fell in love with a married woman, Frieda Weekley, and they eloped to Germany together. They were married in 1914 and spent the rest of their lives together travelling around the world. In 1915 Lawrence published The Rainbow which was banned in Great Britain for obscenity. Women in Love continues the story of the Brangwen family begun in The Rainbow and was finished by Lawrence in 1916 but not published until 1920. Another of Lawrence's most famous works, Lady Chatterley's Lover, was privately printed in Florence in 1928 but was not published in Britain until 1960, when it was the subject of an unsuccessful court case brought against it for obscenity. As well as novels, Lawrence also wrote in a variety of other genres and his poetry, criticism and travel books remain highly regarded. He was also a keen painter. D.H. Lawrence died in France on 2 March 1930.

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Daniel Defoe

Daniel Defoe (c.1660-1731), one of the most famous writers in English literature, was born in London, the son of James Foe, a butcher. It was Daniel who changed his name to De Foe or Defoe in about 1705. He was interested in politics and opposed King James II. After the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and William III was on the throne, Defoe became one of his personal friends. He became a writer for the government and a satircal writer on various social issues of the time. He turned to full time writing after hearing the inspirational story of a sailor who was rescued after living alone on a desert island in the Pacific, the result being his first novel ROBINSON CRUSOE. Several other adventure stories followed, including MOLL FLANDERS.