Pronounced obscene when it was first published in 1915, The Rainbow is the epic story of three generations of the Brangwens, a Midlands family. A visionary novel, considered to be one of Lawrence’s finest, it explores the complex sexual and psychological relationships between men and women in an increasingly industrialized world. “Lives are separate, but life is continuous—it continues in the fresh start by the separate life in each generation,” wrote F. R. Leavis. “No work, I think, has presented this perception as an imaginatively realized truth more compellingly than The Rainbow.”
Introduction and Notes by Keith Cushman
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time.
Editorial Review(s)
“[Lawrence] had that quality of genius which sucks out of ordinary experience essences strange or unknown to men.” —Anaïs Nin
“What astonished me reading it this time round is the iconoclastic modernity of the novel...the sense of daring experiment...When this is combined with sexual overtness and a revolutionary call for the individual to achieve "Me-ness" in opposition to the nation, industry and war, we have a book that, appearing as it did in 1915, seemed genuinely disturbing.” —Guardian
About the Author
David Herbert Lawrence was born on 11th September 1885 in Eastwood, a small mining village in Nottinghamshire, in the English Midlands. Despite ill health as a child and a comparatively disadvantageous position in society, he became a teacher in 1908, and took up a post at a school in Croydon, London. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1910, and from then until his death he wrote feverishly, producing poetry, essays, plays, travel books, short stories, and eleven more novels, including The Rainbow, Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence travelled widely, settling for periods in Italy, New Mexico and Mexico. He married Frieda Weekley in 1914 and died of tuberculosis in 1930.
Keith Cushman is the author of D. H. Lawrence at Work. The books he has edited or coedited include The Letters of D. H. Lawrence and Amy Lowell 1914–1925 and Lawrence’s Memoir of Maurice Magnus as well as two collections of essays, The Challenge of D. H. Lawrence and D. H. Lawrence’s Literary Inheritors. He is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
