TheRainbow

A novel which chronicles the lines of three generations of the Brangwen family and the emergence of modern England.

Set between the 1840s and the early years of the twentieth century The Rainbow tells the story of three generations of the Brangwen family, ancient occupiers of Marsh Farm, Nottinghamshire. Through courting, pregnancy, marriage and defiance Lawrence explores love and the conflicts it brings.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY RACHEL CUSK

Lawrence is the most Dostoevskian of English novelists, in whose best work conflicting ideological positions are brought into play and set up against each other in dialogue that is never simply or finally resolvedNo writer since Lawrence has been so openly governed by what seems like powerful personal likes and dislikes, grievances, and by what appear to many as untenable prejudicesWhat astonished me reading it this time round is the iconoclastic modernity of the novel... the sense of daring experiment.. I had entirely forgotten what drastic steps Lawrence was taking with character, for instance. Or with narrative (the novel proceeds cyclically). 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