The Well of Loneliness

Constance Chatterley, wife of a paralyzed baronet, starts an affair with the estate's gamekeeper. Banned for over thirty years, this is the full unexpurgated text.

D. H. Lawrence

Emma Bovary, bored with her country doctor husband, looks for passion in two lovers and in debt. The novel put Flaubert on trial for obscenity in 1857.

Gustave Flaubert

Edna Pontellier, a wife and mother in New Orleans, falls in love with a younger man and stops playing her part. Critics of 1899 called it morbid and immoral.

Kate Chopin

Jude and his cousin Sue love each other, live together unmarried and pay for it. A bishop burned the book and Hardy never wrote another novel.

Thomas Hardy

Carrie moves to Chicago and lives with one man, then runs off with a married one, and the novel never punishes her. Its own publisher tried to bury it in 1900.

Theodore Dreiser