The Rainbow

📙 The Rainbow is, in many ways, unique among D. H. Lawrence's novels- It contains, as Richard Aldington puts it, "a serenity and leisureliness which are absent from his first three novels and did not survive the First World War and the persecution inflicted on him for writing this literary masterpiece." It is Lawrence's longest book, and his most ambitious one. For three years he struggled with it, writing eight complete versions before he was done (Lady Chatterley's Lover involved only three.'), and putting his most intense life and spirit into it. "I love and adore this new book,' he wrote Edward Garnett in 1912. "It is all crude as yet,...most cumbersome and floundering—but I think it's great--so new, so really a stratum deeper than I think anybody has ever gone, in a novel." The Rainbow tells the story of three generations of a passionate Nottinghamshire family whose love affairs move backward and forward across the years, and is the first part of a trilogy that also includes Women in Love and Aaron's Rod. Almost immediately upon its publication in 1915 it was prosecuted and banned; Aldington says: "it is incredible that a book so passionate, so poetic, so full of the pith of life and the loveliness of Nature should have been labelled as pornography." "There have been few writers in any era, and certainly none in ours, who have combined as Lawrence did the gifts of the creative heart and the penetration of the critical intellect."