The Rainbow

The Three Generations

The Rainbow opens with one of the great passages in English prose: Lawrence’s description of the Brangwen farmers on their Midlands farm, their relationship to the land and the seasons, the difference between the men’s immersion in the physical world and the women’s reaching toward something beyond it. The women, watching carts go by on the road to Nottingham, watch something else — the world of education, of speech, of connection to a civilization that the farm does not touch. The men are embedded in the rhythms of the earth; the women strain toward the arch of the rainbow, toward the horizon.

This image — the rainbow as the unreached promise, the arch of possible becoming — gives the novel its title and its structure. Three generations of the Brangwen family are traced across sixty years: Tom Brangwen and his Polish wife Lydia; their son Will and his wife Anna; and Ursula, the novel’s central figure, whose story begins in the final third and continues in the sequel, Women in Love. Each generation reaches further — toward consciousness, toward the world, away from the earth — and each reaches with different success and different cost.

Tom Brangwen’s marriage to Lydia is perhaps the most extraordinary account of a marriage in Lawrence’s fiction: the early chapters trace the adjustment of two beings to each other, the slow creation of a shared reality out of two incompatible solitudes, with an attention to the physical and emotional textures of intimate life that has no parallel in English fiction of the period. Lawrence is interested not in the social machinery of marriage but in what actually happens between two people — in the bed, in the kitchen, in the silences.

Ursula and the Coming World

The novel’s final third, in which Ursula Brangwen comes of age at the turn of the century, is where The Rainbow catches fire. Ursula is the first Lawrence character entirely of the modern world: educated, independent, determined to find a life that is not defined by marriage and motherhood alone, but without a clear sense of what else is available to her. Her relationship with Winifred Inger, her schoolmistress, is one of the earliest frank treatments of female homosexual desire in English fiction; her later relationship with Skrebensky, the soldier who wants a conventional wife, is the novel’s central drama.

The police seizure of The Rainbow in 1915, and the court order for its destruction, is one of the more significant acts of literary censorship in English history. The novel was not republished in Britain until 1926. What triggered the prosecution was partly the Winifred sections, partly the frank treatment of female sexuality throughout, and partly the general sense — which the authorities were not entirely wrong to detect — that Lawrence was writing a novel that argued against the values the prosecution represented.

Ursula’s final vision — the rainbow arching over a world that industrial civilization has temporarily darkened — is an act of faith rather than an argument. Lawrence believed the world would renew itself; the prosecution of his novel suggested that the world was not ready to agree.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — Lawrence’s most formally ambitious early novel, and the first half of what is arguably the greatest fictional portrait of English consciousness in the modern period.