The Rainbow

The Rainbow is a novel by the English writer D. H. Lawrence, published in 1915. It is his longest and most deeply felt work, and a companion piece to the later Women in Love. Set in the mining district and countryside of Lawrence’s native Nottinghamshire, the novel unfolds as a family history the emotional lives and fates of three generations of the Brangwen family of yeoman farmers: the first generation, Tom Brangwen, marries Lydia, a Polish noblewoman in exile, and their marriage moves from conflict and estrangement toward mutual acceptance and harmony; the second generation, Anna and Will, fall into endless quarrels after their honeymoon, Will seeking solace in wood carving and Anna settling into childbearing, the two living out their lives without understanding each other; the third generation, Ursula, is the heart of the book—she is educated, becomes a teacher, experiences love and disillusionment, and is determined to break free of the old order of life and find a complete life of her own. The novel portrays the changes in English rural life after industrial civilization invaded the countryside in the late nineteenth century, and, with rare depth and poetic prose, explores the psychological and emotional relations between men and women, making “the search for a natural, harmonious union” the theme running through three generations. The fields and flood at the opening and the rainbow on the horizon at the end are famous symbolic images. Although banned in the year of publication, the book has since been recognized as an important twentieth-century English novel and is often regarded as an epic of female self-awareness.