On this date in 1960 Penguin Books was acquitted of obscenity for publishing D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Frye in “Varieties of Literary Utopias”:

The attempt to see the sexual relationship as something in itself, and not merely as a kind of social relationship, is something that gives a strongly pastoral quality to the work of D.H. Lawrence.  For him the sexual relation is natural in the sense that its closest and immediate affinities with physical environment, the world of animals and plants and walks in the country and sunshine and rain.  The idyllic sense of this world as helping to protect and insulate true love from the noisy city-world of disembodied consciousness runs through all Lawrence’s work from the early White Peacock to the late Lady Chatterley’s Lover.  People complain, Lawrence says, that he wants them to be “savages,” but the gentian flowering on its coarse stem is not savage.  (CW 27, 213)