The Return of the Repressed: Maternal Histories in the 1960s

Abstract

Penguin’s victory in the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960 seems, in retrospect, to mark the opening victory of liberated modernity over the old guard (those stuffy elders who, famously, would not want their wife or servant to read Lawrence’s book). It is the moment when sex came out into the open to be freely discussed — and in literary terms stepped out of the coded pages of the historical novel and into the contemporary moment.