The Rainbow (Wordsworth Classics) [Paperback]

Lawrence is not fashionable at present, perhaps because he is just too good, and too gifted. Hardly any other English writer, perhaps only Thomas Hardy, comes near him in his ability to show the reality of people's whole lives, to present their emotions, and to depict the experience of living and working in 20th-century Britain. This is a unique and marvellous book, but we should also read his 'Sons and lovers' and 'Women in love'.- William Podamore --http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R2RFHP029WZHET/ref=cm_cr_pr_viewpnt#R2RFHP029WZHET --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

This Wordsworth Edition includes an exclusive 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.

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. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Kate Flint is University Lecturer in Victorian and Modern English Literature at the University of Oxford. She is the author of The Woman Reader, 1837-1914 (OUP, 1993), and has edited World's Classics editions of Dickens, Trollope, and Woolf.