With its four-letter words & its explicit descriptions of sexual intercourse, Lady Chatterley's Lover is the novel with which D. H. Lawrence is most often associated. First published privately in Florence in 1928, it only became a worldwide best-seller after Penguin Books had successfully resisted an attempt by the British Director of Public Prosecutions to prevent them offering an unexpurgated edition to the general public. The famous `trial of Lady Chatterley' heralded the sexual revolution of the coming decades & signalled the defeat of Establishment prudery. Yet Lawrence himself was hardly a liberationist & the conservatism of many aspects of his novel would later lay it open to attacks from the political avant-garde & from feminists. The story of how the wife of Sir Clifford Chatterley responds when her husband returns from the war paralysed from the waist down, & of the tender love which then develops between her & her husband's gamekeeper, is a complex one open to a variety of conflicting interpretations. This edition of the novel offers an occasion for a new generation of readers to discover what all the fuss was about; to appraise Lawrence's bitter indictment of modern industrial society, & to ask themselves what lessons there might be for the 21st century in his intense exploration of the complicated relations between love & sex.