The Rainbow
D.H. Lawrence(1915)
Extract
She was the doorway to him, he to her.
Three generations of a Nottinghamshire farming family stand beneath the same sky, and each reaches for a covenant the world is less willing to offer. D.H. Lawrence published this novel in 1915, and it was immediately suppressed for obscenity, its frank treatment of desire too much for wartime England. The prose pulses with a rhythm drawn from the King James Bible, incantatory and elemental, rendering the inner life of bodies with an intensity that still startles. Ursula Brangwen, the culminating figure, walks through the modern world demanding a wholeness that factories and schools cannot provide. Lawrence writes the self as a force of nature against the mechanical order. The rainbow arching over the final page is a promise unclaimed.
If you loved this
Lawrence continues the same family saga with more intensity, and the struggle between men and women deepens.
Eliot writes the same three-generation story of English provincial life, but with Victorian restraint where Lawrence has volcanic passion.
Brontë matches Lawrence's elemental intensity: the same dark energy running through landscape and desire.