The Rainbow

Published in 1915 and banned for obscenities in the same year, The Rainbow was the first half of what Lawrence intended to be a full novel. It concerns three generations of the Brangwen family and how they found individual progress hindered by social conditions. The starts with the marriage of Tom Brangwen to Lydia Lensky, a woman with little will of her own following the death of her husband, and finding herself domiciled in a strange and unforgiving country. In moving the plot through Lydia, past Will and Anna, and onto Ursula the granddaughter, Lawrence shows his characters breaking the confines of the social surroundings. Whether that’s community, class or the pitfalls of fate, he makes a case for personal fulfilment that verges on the religious.