LAWRENCE, D. H.

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Autograph letter signed relating to the clandestine publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Autograph letter signed from Lawrence to Allen W. Steele of the book wholesalers William Jackson Ltd, requesting that they return to the bearer of the letter, Enid Hilton, over 70 copies of Lady Chatterley's Lover which they had ordered and subsequently rejected. Privately printed in Florence in 1928 with the help of the Florentine bookseller Pino Orioli, Lady Chatterley's Lover proved deeply controversial due to its frank eroticism. It was this controversy which led to William Jackson cancelling their order, fearing the rumours of a potential raid by the police, and forcing Lawrence to recover the copies. The incident is related in the Cambridge Biography of D. H. Lawrence: "The difficulties began in July when a London firm with a bulk order (William Jackson Ltd) looked at one of the more than seventy copies they had received and decided, on both legal and moral grounds, that on no account did they want to be involved. Because they had asked Lawrence where they should now send the books, he needed someone in London who could collect and store them for him (to tell the firm to send them back to Florence risked attracting more attention than he thought wise). The person he turned to was Enid Hilton... Lawrence was nervous about involving an essentially non-literary person in his literary affairs, someone from the more 'ordinary' world of his early friends and family, particularly as the

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