Book description
To mark the publication of Stop What You're Doing and Read
This!, a collection of essays celebrating reading, Vintage
Classics are releasing 12 limited edition themed ebook 'bundles', to
tempt readers to discover and rediscover great books.
LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER
INTRODUCED BY BLAKE MORRISON
Clifford Chatterley returns from the First World War as an invalid.
Constance nurses him and tries to be the dutiful wife. However,
childless and listless she feels oppressed by their marriage and their
isolated life. Partly encouraged by Clifford to seek a lover, she
embarks on a passionate affair with the gamekeeper, Mellors. Through
their liaison Lawrence explores the complications of sex, love and
class. Written in 1928 and subsequently banned, Lady Chatterley's
Lover is one of the most subversive novels in English literature.
MOLL FLANDERS
These are the fortunes and misfortunes of Moll Flanders: born in
Newgate Prison, twelve years a prostitute, five times a wife (once to
her own brother), twelve years a thief and eight years a transported
felon in Her Majesty's colony of Virginia. Daniel Defoe's rollicking
tale presents life in the prisons, alleyways and underworlds of
eighteenth-century London, and gives us Moll - scandalous,
unscrupulous and utterly irresistible.
David Herbert Lawrence was born 11 September 1885 in Eastwood,
Nottinghamshire. His father was a miner and his mother was a
schoolteacher. In 1906 he took up a scholarship at Nottingham
University to study to be a teacher. His first novel, The White
Peacock, was published in 1911. Lawrence gave up teaching in 1911
due to illness. In 1912 he met and fell in love with a married woman,
Frieda Weekley, and they eloped to Germany together. They were married
in 1914 and spent the rest of their lives together travelling around
the world. In 1915 Lawrence published The Rainbow which was
banned in Great Britain for obscenity. Women in Love continues
the story of the Brangwen family begun in The Rainbow and was
finished by Lawrence in 1916 but not published until 1920. Another of
Lawrence's most famous works, Lady Chatterley's Lover, was
privately printed in Florence in 1928 but was not published in Britain
until 1960, when it was the subject of an unsuccessful court case
brought against it for obscenity. As well as novels, Lawrence also
wrote in a variety of other genres and his poetry, criticism and
travel books remain highly regarded. He was also a keen painter. D. H.
Lawrence died in France on 2 March 1930.
Daniel Defoe was born in London in 1660. He worked briefly as
a hosiery merchant, then as an intelligence agent and political
writer. His writings resulted in his imprisonment on several
occasions, and earned him powerful friends and enemies. During his
lifetime Defoe wrote over two hundred and fifty books, pamphlets and
journals and travelled widely in both Europe and the British Isles.
Among his most famous works are Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll
Flanders (1722) and A Journal of the Plague Year (1722).
Though Defoe was nearly sixty before he began writing fiction, his
work is so fundamental to the development of the novel that he is
often cited as the first true English novelist. He is also regarded as
a founding father of modern journalism and one of the earliest travel
writers. Daniel Defoe died in April 1731.
