What’s in a banned book? Usually, sex that threatens the status quo. So it was with Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the DH Lawrence novel that launched a thousand libidos.

Despite being first published in 1929, it took 31 years for an uncensored copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover to be released in the UK. When it was, the contents – which follow Lady Constance Chatterley as she discovers herself through an intense sexual affair with gardener Oliver Mellors – so shocked the British public that publisher Penguin Books was prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act.

In September, it was announced that a copy of Lady Chatterley previously belonging to Sir Lawrence Byrne – the judge who presided over the obscenity trial in 1960 – was set to be auctioned. The text includes helpful annotations identifying its most explicit passages, courtesy of Byrne’s wife, and is predicted to fetch at least £15,000.

Byrne’s wife also sewed a little damask bag for her husband’s copy of Lady Chatterley, so that he wasn’t photographed carrying it. There is a certain amount of irony in this, as the book became an accessory in its own right in the months following the jury’s ‘not guilty’ verdict. Over three million copies were sold, thanks largely to the publicity created by the history-making trial. The fears of the prosecution (who opened the trial by asking “Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters – because girls can read as well as boys – reading this book?”) were horribly realised.

But the world didn’t end, and moral depravity didn’t take over. Instead, the uncensored publication of Lady Chatterley welcomed in a new era where sexual relationships were far more freely depicted in the arts. The chastity belt that had long been tightened around erotic literature was loosened a little.

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