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The Rainbow is a brilliant novel, one which I admired a bit more than I enjoyed reading. At times D.H. Lawrence astounded me with the lushness, beauty and depth of his prose but at other times I felt that the writing was overwrought and overwritten. The latter made reading this novel more of a chore at times, rather than a pleasure. This is the same problem I had with Mothers and Sons; too much of a good thing.

Lawrences uses the natural world for its beauty and for its symbolic power. The use of metaphors and allusions to the natural world abound suggestive of Biblical, religious/spiritual, psychological, sexual and other meanings. His prose are more like poetry, long on imagery of both the external and the internal (emotional) landscape.

This novel is written on a grand scale, spanning a period from the 1840s to 1905, a time of great change in societal norms and industry. We follow the changing patterns of love and marriage in 3 generations of the Brangwens. Lawrence also weaves in religion, sexuality, the natural world, industrialization, homosexuality and women’s rights, to name a few.

This novel is about many things but more than anything else what stood out were the strong women. In each of the three generations of Brangwens it is always the women who are strong and central to the story. Lydia, Anna and Ursula, you come to know very well. The character portrayal of these three women are exceptional. Lydia and Anna are happy producing baby after baby. Ursula’s story is different. It is one of psychological awakening and the struggle that requires. Her relationship with her lover is "ambivalent;" she both hates and loves him at the same time. She pulls him in and soon after pushes him away. She hates him while having sex with him. She loves him but hates what he represents to her - conventionality. (Ambivalence is a concept borrowed from Freud whose ideas can be found elsewhere in this novel). Ursula is the first Brangwen to ask herself what she wants out of life and to wrestle with this question:

“Why, oh why must one grow up, why must one inherit this heavy, numbing responsibility of living an undiscovered life? Out of the nothingness and the undifferentiated mass, to make something of herself! But what? In the obscurity and pathlessness to take a direction! But whither? How take even one step? And yet, how stand still? This was torment indeed, to inherit the responsibility of one’s own life.�

Sensuality and sexuality are suffused throughout the The Rainbow. Descriptions of nature are infused with sensuality and the most intimate and emotional encounters are often described in terms of nature and the elements. In fact, nature and sexual love are entwined for Lawrence. Lovers often have sex outdoors, surrounded by trees, under a bright moon, etc.. Lawrence beautifully conveys desire, love and passion as well as the intensity and intimacy of a sexual encounter without ever writing explicitly about sex. He doesn't need to as these quotes show:

“She lay motionless, with wide-open eyes looking at the moon. He came direct to her, without preliminaries. She held him pinned down at the chest, awful. The fight, the struggle for consummation was terrible. It lasted till it was agony to his soul, till he succumbed, till he gave way as if dead, lay with his face buried, partly in her hair, partly in the sand, motionless, as if he would be motionless now forever, hidden away in the dark, buried, only buried, he only wanted to be buried in the goodly darkness, only that, and no more.�

“Their flesh was one rock from which the life gushed, out of her who was smitten and rent, from him who quivered and yielded.�

“The lovers become one dual movement, dancing on the slippery grass�.It was a glaucous intertwining, delicious flux and contest in flux. �

“His blood beat up in waves of desire�.if he could come really within the blazing kernel of darkness, if really he could be destroyed, burnt away till he lit with her in one consummation, that were supreme, supreme.�


The novel ends with the vision of a rainbow, a sign of hope and regeneration for Ursula who has been through a lot in the course of this novel. (Her story continues in Women In Love).

"She saw in the rainbow the earth's new architecture, the old brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of truth, fitting to the overarching heaven.

I listened to this novel on an audio recording narrated by Tony Foster, one of Librivox� finest narrators. His narration was superb.