“Obscenity only comes in when the mind despises and fears the body, and the body hates and resists the mind,” writes DH Lawrence in Lady Chatterley’s Lover – a sentence that sums up the attitudes towards sex in early-20th-century Britain that he rebelled against.
Both Lady Chatterley (first published privately in Italy in 1928) and 1915’s The Rainbow were the subjects of obscenity trials in the UK, and the explicit nature of Lawrence’s writing earned him the moniker “the pornographer”. But 30 years after his death from tuberculosis in 1930, he became a totem of sexual liberation when Lady Chatterley was published unexpurgated for the first time in Britain.
Following the model of BBC Radio 4’s Three Faces of WH Auden, which aired in 2023, Three Faces of DH Lawrence is a three-part series that considers the key themes of Lawrence’s work: sex, nature and class. Presenter Michael Symmons Roberts interviews academics in the UK and in Italy, where Lawrence lived for much of his self-imposed exile from Britain, including some whose parents knew the author in Florence at the time he was writing Lady Chatterley. Beginning with sex, Roberts draws out the contradictions inherent in Lawrence’s personal life and his work. Was he a misogynist or was he empowering women? How was it that a puritanical monogamist created a series of paintings considered so indecent they were seized by the police? Is his writing “the most evil outpouring that has ever besmirched the literature of our country”, as one critic called it, or, in the view of EM Forster, the work of “the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation”?
Three Faces of DH Lawrence immerses you in the world of one of the 20th century’s greatest and most notorious writers, tracing the sociopolitical developments that impacted his work, its writing and its reception. But it never quite offers a sense of the real man behind the controversy.
Three Faces of DH Lawrence
BBC Radio 4
[See also: The English rebel]
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This article appears in the 07 May 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Peace Delusion