The Rainbow

David Herbert Richards Lawrence was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire in 1885. His father was a miner and his mother a teacher. His output was both prolific and diverse including novels, plays, short stories, essays, poems, travel books, paintings, translations and literary criticism. Lawrence had unconventional opinions, especially about sexuality, and at the time of his death he was thought of mainly as a pornographer who had frittered away his considerable talents. But E.M. Forster, in an obituary notice, described him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later critics concurred, and Lawrence is now remembered as an important modernist intellectual.

The Rainbow, one of D. H. Lawrence's greatest literary triumphs, chronicles the lives of three generations of the Brangwen family of Nottinghamshire from the 1840s to the early years of the twentieth century. The book was condemned and suppressed on its first publication in 1915 for its sensuous immediacy and the frankness with which it explores emotional and sexual life.