The Rainbow (Wordsworth Classics) - Softcover

D. H. Lawrence

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1853262501 ISBN 13: 9781853262500

Publisher: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1995

Synopsis

With an Introduction and Notes by Lionel Kelly, University of Reading In 1915, Lawrence's frank representation of sexuality in The Rainbow caused a furore and the novel was seized by the police and banned almost as soon as it was published. Today it is recognised as one of the classic English novels of the twentieth century. The Rainbow is about three generations of the Brangwen family of Nottinghamshire from the 1840s to the early years of the twentieth century. Within this framework Lawrence s essential concern is with the passional lives of his characters as he explores the pressures that determine their lives, using a religious symbolism in which the rainbow of the title is his unifying motif. His primary focus is on the individual's struggle to growth and fulfilment within marriage and changing social circumstances, a process shown to grow more difficult through the generations. Young Ursula Brangwen, whose story is continued in Women in Love, is finally the central figure in Lawrence's anatomy of the confining structures of English social life and the impact of industrialisation and urbanisation on the human psyche.

About this title

Book Description

D. H. Lawrence started 'The Sisters' in 1913, wrote four different versions and claimed to have discarded 'quite a thousand pages' before completing The Rainbow in 1915. Mark Kinkead-Weekes gives the composition history and collates the surviving states of the text to assess the damage done to Lawrence's great novel.

From the Inside Flap

Pronounced obscene when it was first published in 1915," The Rainbow is the epic story of three generations of the Brangwens, a Midlands family. A visionary novel, considered to be one of Lawrence's finest, it explores the complex sexual and psychological relationships between men and women in an increasingly industrialized world. "Lives are separate, but life is continuous--it continues in the fresh start by the separate life in each generation," wrote F. R. Leavis. "No work, I think, has presented this perception as an imaginatively realized truth more compellingly than "The Rainbow."

About this edition

• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions Ltd
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 1853262501
• ISBN 13: 9781853262500
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448