Mercurio and I therefore had considerable discussions about the advisability of including oral sex. In one draft there were a few instances as performed by Mellors, and yet I thought the act anachronistic, depicted nowhere in Lawrence, and likely to have been disapproved of by him had he thought about it. Mercurio thought that there was less historic variation in sexual practice than I did, and that in any case he was adapting the novel for the present in the sexual language of the present. We discussed masturbation similarly, and this was cut entirely, so strong was Lawrence’s condemnation of it as solipsistic, barren, and that towards which “pornography” tends.

The scenes which enraged Second Wave feminists (Connie’s worship of the penis and Mellors’ disparagement of the clitoris) were not included. Much needed to be cut in order to contract the novel to 90 minutes, and in any case Mercurio felt that the novel on balance was pro-women, and that Mellors (like Clifford) was a knowing representation of aspects of the fractious, dying Lawrence.

Many viewers will not have noticed their absence. So successfully did Second Wave feminism knock Lawrence from the perch on which 1950s and ’60s adulation had placed him that he is now relatively little read, and the offending passages, like the outrage about them, have been largely forgotten.

There is one final irony in the novel’s fate — subtler but no less pervasive than those mentioned above. Lawrence’s idea that meaningful sex is part of a good life has become distorted into the idea that if you aren’t having lots of “good sex” (not what Lawrence meant by this), then you are somehow inadequate. Sex to us is still a cocktail, but it is important to our sense of self-worth that we drink — or are thought to be drinking — very many very good cocktails. And yet we are also — especially when we think about porn — beginning to wonder whether we have lost our way in our relations to sex. It might help to revisit the novel which, more than any other, got us to where we are in the first place, and which more than others tries to remedy precisely this problem. Revisiting it in this wisely restrained adaptation — or still better in its original words — we might see what medicine Lawrence was really trying to give us, and decide whether we want to — or can — take it.