The Rainbow (Wordsworth Classics) - Softcover

Lawrence, D.H.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1853262501 ISBN 13: 9781853262500

Publisher: Wordsworth Editions, 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

Review:

"The greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." -- E.M. Forster

The greatest imaginative novelist of our generation. E. M. Forster
He was a language, a setting, a world entirely of his own. He was, like all true poetry, against tepid living and tepid loves [giving] full expression to the gestures of passion. Anais Nin"

-The greatest imaginative novelist of our generation.---E. M. Forster
-He was a language, a setting, a world entirely of his own....He was, like all true poetry, against tepid living and tepid loves...[giving] full expression to the gestures of passion.---Anais Nin

"The greatest imaginative novelist of our generation."--E. M. Forster

"He was a language, a setting, a world entirely of his own....He was, like all true poetry, against tepid living and tepid loves...[giving] full expression to the gestures of passion."--Anais Nin

Book Description:

Professor Mark Kinkead-Weekes gives the composition history and collates the surviving states of the text to assess the damage done to Lawrence's novel, and to provide a text as close to that which the author wrote as is now possible.

About this edition

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