In the Library
The Rainbow
D.H. Lawrence, 1915
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 13 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 16
- Length
- Length 186k words
£1.99
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She was the doorway to him, he to her.
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If you like this, try
Women in Love
D.H. Lawrence
Lawrence continues the same family saga with more intensity, and the struggle between men and women deepens.
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Middlemarch
George Eliot
Eliot writes the same three-generation story of English provincial life, but with Victorian restraint where Lawrence has volcanic passion.
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Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë
Brontë matches Lawrence's elemental intensity: the same dark energy running through landscape and desire.
£1.99
About the book
Under the moon, a man and a woman gather sheaves of cut corn across a stubble field, walking toward each other and away, lifting and setting down in a rhythm that is a courtship before either has spoken of love. The Rainbow is full of such scenes, where bodies say what the Brangwens cannot, and Lawrence's prose moves with them: incantatory, looping, swollen with the rush of sap and blood until you feel the sentence breathe. Three generations of one Midlands family reach for the same thing, each further than the last, from Tom and the Polish widow who stays forever partly beyond him, through Anna and Will's long bruising marriage, to Ursula, who wants a whole self the land could never give. Seized and burned as obscene on publication, its real scandal was never sex but Lawrence's conviction that industrial England had torn body from spirit, and that the wound could heal. The arc of colour Ursula sees at the close is no promise of heaven but proof that a better world is owed, still waiting to be built.