According to Jed Mercurio, the scriptwriter of the new BBC adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he decided not include D H Lawrence’s four-letter words in his version. "Lawrence chose a certain type of language in his book which was then groundbreaking,” he said. “It did not feel that today we would be breaking new ground if we were to use those words. If you want to use certain words you have to justify them, and it did not seem relevant."

He has, then, effectively torn the heart out of the novel. What is left of Lawrence, when the original language is removed, is not a daring exploration of sexuality, but a plotline ripe for costume caricature. And from a brief trailer, it certainly looks as if the producers were striving for a steamier version of Downtown Abbey, cranked into a titillating gear. The heroine looks interested only in sex and satiation, and the hero is the incarnation of smouldering lust, which is a travesty of both characters. Connie was emotionally bruised, and Mellors almost a recluse who had all but forsworn women.

To return to the four-letter words Lawrence used – one of which was love – he was very deliberately striving for psychological veracity. His tone was the opposite of crude or exploitative, his intentions not to offend but to make people think. As he said, “The words that shock so much at first don’t shock at all after a while. Is this because the mind is depraved by habit? Not a bit. It is that the words merely shocked the eye, they never shocked the mind at all... People with minds realize that they aren’t shocked, and never really were: and they experience a sense of relief.”

If Mercurio’s version manages to convey the book’s intention of depicting sex honestly and openly, without the lovingly-meant strong words that Lawrence’s lovers speak, then all credit to him. I doubt he will, however. It’s more likely this novel is being filmed yet again for the prurient thrill its illicit romance holds still, the stuff of schoolroom sniggers. Yet in the novel, Connie Chatterley is not upper class, but from the intelligentsia, and Mellors, for all his Derbyshire brogue, is a former lieutenant in the army and, as one observer reflects, “really quite the gentleman”, in speech as well as manner. But like many Scots in those times, and even now, he spoke in two languages. That he chose the earthiness of his local tongue is only one of several indications of the unsalacious sexual self-expression that Lawrence wanted to show.

Like many others, I first read this as a teenager. What I remembered most vividly was how gentle it was. In fact, Lawrence first intended to call it Tenderness. It is a strikingly thoughtful novel, where he is frank about erotic and emotional desires from the first pages. But what stands out from this work, as with his others, is the sensual charge behind every line. It is not that sex infuses every thought or deed, but that Lawrence’s view of life was passionate, never tepid or purely cerebral. Whether he is describing a brood of chicks, a night-time wood, or the surly manner of factory workers, there is a profound sense of physicality and full-blooded presence.

Though first published in Italy in 1928, Lady Chatterley’s Lover was not published in Britain until 1960, after the famous obscenity trial at the Old Bailey. How astonishing, then, that although Lawrence represented a radical new way of writing, to which almost all good writers since owe a debt, he is hardly spoken of outside academic circles. Yet to read any of his novels, and perhaps especially his poetry, is to discover a timeless master of style and meaning, the depth of his imagination and ambition impressive but also salutary. Little short of a workaholic, this miner’s son took the novel into a new dimension. And nobody has better summed up Lady Chatterley’s Lover, his last novel, than he did himself: “To me it is beautiful and tender and frail as the naked self is.” To appreciate that fully, one should read it, not watch it.