The Rainbow (1915) - D. H. Lawrence

Written by D. H. Lawrence
Read by Wanda McCaddon
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 56 Kbps
Unabridged

Series: Brangwen Family, Book 1
Length: 18 hrs and 22 mins
Release date: 12-27-10
Publisher: Tantor Audio

Set in the rural Midlands of England during the Victorian Era and ending prior to WWI, The Rainbow (1915) revolves around three generations of the Brangwens, a strong, vigorous family, deeply involved with the land. When Tom Brangwen marries a Polish widow, Lydia Lensky, and adopts her daughter Anna as his own, he is unprepared for the conflict and passion that erupts between them. All are seeking individual fulfilment, but it is Ursula, Anna’s spirited daughter, who, in search for self-knowledge, rejects the conventional role of womanhood.

Filled with biblical imagery, The Rainbow addresses searching human issues in a setting of precise and vivid detail.

In The Rainbow, D. H. Lawrence challenged the customary limitations of language and convention to carry into the structures of his prose the fascination with boundaries and space that characterize the entire novel. 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.

One review—But these are not conventionally Christian people: they seek and submit to the forces of nature, their physical desires, free of guilt and shame. They marvel at creation, and worship it and each other through the medium of their mingling, tingling flesh. A deep, true sacrament. (Yet when this was banned shortly after publication, it was on the grounds of obscenity, rather than blasphemy: lesbianism alluded to, though nowadays, any outrage comes from the fact that one is the teacher of the other .)

This is a profoundly sensual, sexual book, but it’s not at all explicit: the most intimate encounters are described in terms of flowers and flames, rather than human anatomy. I’m not one for florid language or euphemisms, but I was first seduced, then bewitched, and finally intoxicated by the surreal erotic lyricism that is often more poem than prose.

You can read Women in Love without reading The Rainbow first. But by reading The Rainbow, you can get a better idea of the characters in Women in Love.

There are at least three other reading of this novel and other versions of all classics would be welcome