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.

Becoming Across Generations

The structural daring of The Rainbow is its refusal of the conventional single-protagonist novel in favour of a multigenerational account of consciousness expanding across sixty years. Three generations of the Brangwen family are traced from the 1840s to the early twentieth century, and each reaches further from the earth and closer to self-awareness than the last. Tom Brangwen, embedded in the rhythms of the farm, marries the Polish widow Lydia; their daughter Anna marries Will; and Anna’s daughter Ursula carries the family fully into the modern world. The image that gives the novel its title — the women of the opening pages watching the road to Nottingham, straining toward the arch of the rainbow, toward education and speech and a civilisation the farm does not touch — establishes the book’s governing movement: a reaching outward and upward that brings both liberation and loss. Each generation gains in consciousness what it surrenders in rootedness, and Lawrence is as interested in the cost of that ascent as in its promise.

The Marriages at the Centre

The early account of Tom and Lydia’s marriage is among the most extraordinary depictions of intimate life in English fiction. Lawrence cares nothing for the social machinery of courtship and everything for what actually happens between two people — the slow adjustment of two incompatible solitudes into a shared reality, accomplished in the bed and the kitchen and the long silences rather than in any social performance. His prose here reaches for the pre-verbal, using repetition and incantation to render states of feeling that ordinary realist narration cannot touch. This style is genuinely demanding and requires acclimatisation; readers expecting the brisk social comedy of the nineteenth-century novel will find instead a sustained attention to the physical and emotional textures of being alive that has no real precedent. The first two generations are less vividly individualised than Ursula’s later story, which can make the opening sections feel like extended prologue, but they are establishing the rising arc the novel’s final third will complete.

Ursula and the Cost of Frankness

The novel catches fire in its closing third, when Ursula Brangwen comes of age at the turn of the century. She is the first Lawrence character wholly of the modern world: educated, independent, determined to build a life not defined solely by marriage and motherhood, yet without any clear model for what else might be available to her. Her relationship with her schoolmistress Winifred Inger is among the earliest frank treatments of female homosexual desire in English fiction, and her later involvement with the conventional soldier Skrebensky supplies the novel’s central drama. The frankness about women’s sexual experience was genuinely revolutionary, and it provoked one of the most significant acts of literary censorship in English history: the novel was seized and ordered destroyed by the courts in 1915 and was not republished in Britain until 1926. Ursula’s closing vision — a rainbow arching over a world that industrial civilisation has temporarily darkened — is an act of faith rather than argument. Lawrence believed the world would renew itself; the suppression of his novel suggested the world was not yet ready to agree.