The academic Indologist Wendy Doniger observed that the lawsuit against her book The Hindus: An Alternative History had had the effect of making it an unexpected bestseller. It draws attention to books that might otherwise have gone under the radar. The best sales pitch is the threat of censorship. Similarly in 1960s Oklahoma, when the moral crusading group Mothers United for Decency set up a “smutmobile” filled with objectionable books, surely some locals used this as a handily curated wishlist? The Protestant librarian Thomas Barlow wrote gleefully that the Catholic church had done his work for him, by pointing to what he himself wanted to read. Of course this became the book equivalent of Barbra Streisand’s attempt to restrict the online circulation of images of her Malibu beach home: a move that inadvertently drew attention to the very things it was intended to suppress. As an addendum to the better known Index of Forbidden Books, the Vatican published an Index Expurgatorius: a list of the bits that could be cut from otherwise offensive books to make them acceptable. That censorship might actually enable the circulation of books rather than restrict it seems counterintuitive, but it’s a pattern we see again and again. He made it more possible, not less, for seminarians to read Shakespeare (except Measure for Measure). Sankey’s redactions were less about censorship and more about doctoring the text to enable it to circulate.

It is that these cheerfully secular, prominently anti-Catholic, ribald dramas were even considered for inclusion in this religious institution in the first place. What’s striking about this, however, is not the censorship. 'His genius was for instant perception and vivid, passionate expression' This introduction also includes a chronology of Lawrence's life and work, further reading, notes and appendices containing the original foreword to Women in Love, a fragment of 'The Sisters', 'Prologue' and 'Wedding' chapters from an earlier draft, a map and discussion of the setting and people involved. In his introduction Amit Chaudhuri discusses Lawrence's style and imagery. Quintessentially modernist, Women is Love is one of Lawrence's most extraordinary, innovative and unsettling works. The focus of the novel is primarily on their relationships, Ursula's with Rupert Birkin, a school inspector, and Gudrun's with industrialist Gerald Crich, and later with a sculptor, Loerke. Women in Love continues where The Rainbow left off, with the third generation of Brangwens: Ursula Brangwen, now a teacher at Beldover, a mining town in the Midlands, and her sister Gudrun, who has returned from art school in London. Lawrence's greatest novel, Women in Love is both a lucid account of English society before the First World War, and a brilliant evocation of the inexorable power of human desire.

Dh lawrence in love