The Rainbow Read online

  In one further way, the image of the rainbow provides an exemplary concluding point for this novel. In itself, an arch—not a full ring of light and colour—and evanescent, it points to the book’s own incompletion. The story of Ursula and of Gudrun, now a fully fledged artist, is continued in Women in Love, a novel far more experimental in its structure than its predecessor, acknowledging the open-endedness, the inconclusiveness of modernity, and deliberately far less tightly set in calendar time: ‘I would wish the time to remain unfixed’, he wrote in an unpublished foreword to the second novel.15 This novel concentrates even more intensely on the impossibility of achieving completeness within a relationship, and continues, even more forcefully, the interrogation of the nature of masculinity which Lawrence had launched not just in The Rainbow, but in Sons and Lovers. Yet what Women in Love lacks, and what The Rainbow so amply gives us, is the sense that in order to reach a full understanding of the uncertain modern period, one needs to be able to root its origins firmly in the contested territories of its history. Just as Ursula, in her grandmother’s room, felt that ‘the door opened on to the greater space, the past’, so the possibilities and choices of the present are not just to be assessed in terms of metaphysical absolutes, but are irrevocably tied to those structures—social, familial, even linguistic—which have preceded them. Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, has written eloquently of the relationship of space to memory. ‘Memories are motionless,’ he remarks, ‘and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are … For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates’.16 The Rainbow charts the movement of history over six decades in terms of shifts in modes of traversing the land—from the coming of the railways, through the tram and bicycle to the motor car—but this actual landscape, despite its concrete, geographical importance to the novel, is ultimately subservient to a different topography, that of the inner life. Similarly, despite the closely worked-through time scheme of the novel, and the sociological exactitude of many of its references, these external points of reference are often subordinated to an individual’s own sense of change or of stagnation, however much they may be an inseparable part of their consciousness. Space, The Rainbow shows, exists both without and within: it is both impersonal and humbling, and a source, a guarantee of potential. Whilst the surface boldness of this novel lies in its sanctification of sexuality, combined with a critique of the deadness of industrialized England, its intellectual and fictional importance lies in its recognition that the representation of both human consciousness and human history must involve a constant interweaving of outer and inner spaces. It is in its mapping of these spaces of our intimacy—in its establishment of a ceaseless dialogue between what lies on the rim of the world and that which vibrates within the individual—that the achievement of The Rainbow lies.

  1 D. H. Lawrence, letter to Edward Garnett, 5 June 1914, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ii, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 183.

  2 D. H. Lawrence, ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’, in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 12.

  3 In The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970) 179, Raymond Williams deftly locates this linguistic movement from realism to modernism within the language progression in Ch. XV of The Rainbow: a movement from the language of community, through the language of ideas, through received emotional language, to a more metaphysical evocation of struggle and consummation.

  4 Paul Éluard, Les Yeux fertiles (Paris: Juillard, 1936), 42.

  5 Quoted in Mark Kinkead-Weekes, Introduction, The Rainbow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 1.

  6 James Douglas, review of The Rainbow in the Star, 22 Oct. 1915, 4; quoted in R. P. Draper (ed.), D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 94.

  7 Letters, ii. 183.

  8 Garnett had sent Lawrence novels by these writers at the end of 1912. For an account of his reading and response to them, see Harry T. Moore, The Priest of Love: A Life of D. H. Lawrence (1954, rev. edn. 1974; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 220—1.

  9 Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Novels’ (later substantially revised as ‘Modern Fiction’), Times Literary Supplement, 10 April 1919, reprinted in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, iii, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1988), 33.

  10 The degree to which Lawrence avoids commitment to contemporary feminist issues can be judged by placing him alongside some of the writers discussed in Jane Eldridge Miller, Rebel Women: Feminism, Modernism and the Edwardian Novel (London: Virago Press, 1994), and Patricia Stubbs, Women and Fiction: Feminism and the Novel 1880–1920 (Brighton: Harvester, 1979).

  11 This lack of specificity did not stop Kate Millett claiming, in her famous onslaught on Lawrence’s sexual politics, that ‘Attentive readers will of course know that the big want is a husband, provided in the sequel in the form of Birkin, who is no less a personage than Lawrence himself.’ Sexual Politics (1969; London: Virago Press, 1977), 261.

  12 Quoted in Moore, The Priest of Love, 305.

  13 John Ruskin, Modern Painters III (1856), The Complete Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (39 vols., London: G. Allen, 1903–12), v 387

  14 D H. Lawrence, ‘Nottingham and the Mining Countryside’ (1929), in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Edward D. McDonald (London: Heinemann, 1936), 138.

  15 D. H. Lawrence, ‘Foreword to Women in Love’, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 1987), 485.

  16 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (La Poétique de l’espace, 1958, trans Maria Jolas, 1964; Boston, Mass. Beacon Press, 1994), 9.

  NOTE ON THE TEXT

  The Rainbow and Women in Love began their existence as one text, ‘The Sisters’, on which Lawrence started work in March 1913. He worked on this until June 1913; between August 1913 and January 1914 he produced a second version of ‘The Sisters’, and then made a further start on a version entitled ‘The Wedding Ring’ in February 1914. Much of this was to form the basis for Women in Love, but one section (from Ella’s—later Ursula’s—first day as a school-teacher to her family’s removal to a new house) remains without major alteration in The Rainbow. He started rewriting again in November 1914, having received an unsympathetic response to ‘The Wedding Ring’ from Methuen, and finished in March 1915; he made extensive revisions to the typescript and proofs between March and August 1915. In particular, these revisions respond to contemporary events: his opposition to militarism, regimentation and to war was increasingly stressed; and a new dislike of Christian democracy, already expressed by him in letters to Bertrand Russell and Lady Ottoline Morrell (Letters ii. 364–8, 370–1) was introduced. Lawrence also worked to make the conflicts within the novel more complex, re-casting the Cathedral scene to make Will seem less to blame in the difficulties faced by him and Anna in their marriage. Similarly, Anna is figured as more culpable in ‘Anna Victrix’. He added the section at the end of ‘The Child’ where Will picks up a girl in Nottingham, and returns to a newly intensified sexual relationship with Anna. J. B. Pinker, at Methuen, wanted cuts as well as additions (very possibly of the passages that were deleted without Lawrence’s consent in the American edition), but these Lawrence refused to make.

  The text of The Rainbow used here is that of the first edition, published in England by Methuen on 30 September 1915. This edition was banned in England in November 1915. Police called at Methuen on 3 and 5 November with a warrant to impound all volumes and unbound sheets in stock, and a summons was served on the publishers on II November. On 13 November, Bow Street magistrates’ court upheld the prosecution under the terms of the Obscene Publications Acts of 1857, and a combined total of 1,195 copies and sets of sheets were subsequently destroyed. B. W. Huebsch published an American edition in December 1915, which expurgated the text in thirteen places: this formed the basis for the 1926 republication of the novel in England (by Martin Secker) and for subsequent editions. The passages deleted were as follows:

  pp. 21–2

  By Jove … the night.

  p. 145

  put off.., on, and

  p. 234

  He wished he were … her flesh

  p. 320

  ‘Let me come—let me come.’

  p. 336

  If she … small breasts!

  p. 336

  heaved against… were separate.

  p. 338

  Ursula lay still… her mistress.

  p. 350

  ‘his thick thighs—’

  p. 452

  undressed,

  p. 453

  But the … always laughing.

  pp. 460–1

  ‘Don’t I satisfy … having me—’

  pp. 475–6

  She let… to her.

  p. 477

  She gave … heaving water.

  Penguin published a text which reverted to the unexpurgated first edition in 1949, but which made some ‘corrections’; it published a direct reprint of the first edition, ed. John Worthen, in 1981. The manuscript of The Rainbow (November 1914–2 March 1915), and the typescript (February 1915–31 May 1915) are in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin. The proofs seem to have disappeared. The edition of The Rainbow in the Cambridge Edition of the works of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) is indispensable, not just for the work which Kinkead-Weekes has carried out on the differing texts of the novel, but for a full and illuminating introduction discussing the novel’s complex compositional and publishing
history. For a bibliographic description of the first edition of The Rainbow, and a concise, informative account of its textual history, see Warren Roberts, A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 19–23.

  Two references to ‘Arthur Brangwen’ have been corrected to ‘Alfred’ (pp. 87–8), and a few other silent emendations to punctuation conventions have been made.

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Editions

  The Rainbow (London: Methuen & Co., 1915): first edition.

  The Rainbow (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1915): first American edition.

  The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

  Letters

  The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. James Boulton and others, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979–93).

  Biography and Criticism

  Clarke, Colin (ed.), D. H. Lawrence: The Rainbow and Women in Love: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1969).

  Delany, Paul, D. H. Lawrence’s Nightmare: The Writer and his Circle in the Years of the Great War (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1979).

  Holderness, Graham, D. H. Lawrence: History, Ideology and Fiction (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1982).

  Ingram, Allan, The Language of D. H. Lawrence (London: Macmillan, 1990).

  Kinkead-Weekes, Mark, ‘The Marble and the Statue: The Exploratory Imagination of D. H. Lawrence’, in Maynard Mack and Ian Gregor (eds.), Imagined Worlds: Essays in Honour of John Butt (London: Methuen, 1968), 371–418.

  ——— ‘The Marriage of Opposites in The Rainbow’, in Mara Kalnins (ed.), D. H. Lawrence: Centenary Essays (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1986), 21–39.

  ——— ‘The Sense of History in The Rainbow’, in Peter Preston and Peter Hoare (eds.), D. H. Lawrence in the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 121–38.

  Meyers, Jeffrey (ed.), D. H. Lawrence and Tradition (London: Athlone Press, 1985).

  ——— (ed.), The Legacy of D. H. Lawrence: New Essays (London: Macmillan, 1987).

  Moore, Harry T., The Priest of Love: A Life of D. H. Lawrence, revised edn. (London: Heinemann, 1974).

  Mudrick, Marvin, ‘The Originality of The Rainbow’, in Harry T Moore (ed.), A D. H. Lawrence Miscellany (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1959).

  Pinkney, Tony, D. H. Lawrence (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990).

  Ross, Charles L., ‘The Revisions of the Second Generation in The Rainbow’, Review of English Studies, 27 (1976), 277–95.

  ——— The Composition of ‘The Rainbow’ and Women in Love’: A History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979).

  Sanders, Scott, D. H. Lawrence: The World of the Major Novels (London: Vision Press, 1973).

  Simpson, Hilary, D. H. Lawrence and Feminism (London: Croom Helm, 1982).

  Smith, Anne (ed.), Lawrence and Women (London: Vision Press, 1978).

  A CHRONOLOGY OF D. H. LAWRENCE

  1885

  David Herbert Lawrence, born 11 September in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, son of coal miner.

  1891

  Begins education which leads from Board School through scholarship to Nottingham High School, and eventually, after a year spent as a clerk in a factory, to teacher training at University College, Nottingham 1906–8.

  1901

  Begins friendship with Jessie Chambers, the ‘Miriam’ of Sons and Lovers.

  1908

  Appointed to staff of Davidson Road School, Croydon.

  1909

  First serious publication, five poems in English Review.

  1910

  Becomes engaged to Louie Burrows. Death of mother, Lydia Lawrence, 9 December. First novel published January 1911, The White Peacock.

  1912

  Breaks off engagement, February. Elopes in May to Germany with Frieda Weekley, wife of professor at Nottingham. Novel, The Trespasser, published.

  1913

  Sons and Lovers published.

  1914

  Marries Frieda. The Prussian Officer stories published.

  1915

  The Rainbow published and immediately banned. Lawrences, impoverished, spend rest of war years in Cornwall, where they are harassed by military authorities, then London, Berkshire, and Derbyshire. At war’s end they leave for Italy. In 1919 Lawrence seriously ill with influenza.

  1920

  Publication of Women in Love in New York, and of The Lost Girl.

  1922

  Leaves Europe for Ceylon and Australia and eventually New Mexico. Fantasia of the Unconscious published, also a collection of stories, England, My England, and novel, Aaron’s Rod.

  1923

  Major stories published, The Ladybird, The Fox, and The Captain’s Doll, critical Studies in Classic American Literature, novel Kangaroo, and poems Birds, Beasts and Flowers.

  1924

  After time in England, France, and Germany, travels to New Mexico and Mexico. Death of father, John Arthur Lawrence, 10 September 1924.

  1925

  After stay in England lives mainly in Italy. It is recognized that Lawrence has tuberculosis.

  1926

  Novel, The Plumed Serpent, published. Makes last visit to England.

  1927

  Mornings in Mexico published.

  1928

  The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories published and, privately in Florence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (unexpurgated text banned in Great Britain until 1960). Collected Poems. Lives in Switzerland and then mainly in France.

  1929

  Exhibition of paintings in London raided by police. Writes Apocalypse, published posthumously 1931.

  1930

  Dies 2 March, at Vence, Alpes Maritimes, France.

  THE RAINBOW

  To Else*

  CONTENTS

  I How Tom Brangwen Married a Polish Lady

  II They Live at the Marsh

  III Childhood of Anna Lensky

  IV Girlhood of Anna Brangwen

  V Wedding at the Marsh

  VI Anna Victrix

  VII The Cathedral

  VIII The Child

  IX The Marsh and the Flood

  X The Widening Circle

  XI First Love

  XII Shame

  XIII The Man’s World

  XIV The Widening Circle

  XV The Bitterness of Ecstasy

  XVI The Rainbow

  CHAPTER I

  HOW TOM BRANGWEN MARRIED A POLISH LADY

  I

  THE Brangwens had lived for generations on the Marsh Farm, in the meadows where the Erewash twisted sluggishly through alder trees, separating Derbyshire from Nottinghamshire. Two miles away, a church-tower stood on a hill, the houses of the little country town climbing assiduously up to it. Whenever one of the Brangwens in the fields lifted his head from his work, he saw the church-tower at Ilkeston* in the empty sky. So that as he turned again to the horizontal land, he was aware of something standing above him and beyond him in the distance.

  There was a look in the eyes of the Brangwens as if they were expecting something unknown, about which they were eager. They had that air of readiness for what would come to them, a kind of surety, an expectancy, the look of an inheritor.

  They were fresh, blond, slow-speaking people, revealing themselves plainly, but slowly, so that one could watch the change in their eyes from laughter to anger, blue, lit-up laughter, to a hard blue-staring anger; through all the irresolute stages of the sky when the weather is changing.