In one passage, which was declared “unfit for family fiction” in a review by James Douglas for The Star and singled out in the courtroom, Ursula begins a lesbian affair with her schoolteacher Winifred, who at one point carries her naked into the sea: By the time Ursula Brangwen is a young woman, sex is frequent and directly addressed. For Anna and Will, bodies are alluded to and desires described. For Tom Brangwen’s generation sex happens, but between paragraphs. The novel’s outlook evolves as it moves through the Victorian era. Moving from 1840 to 1905, it tells the story of the Brangwen family: the artistically inclined but unintellectual Tom who succeeds to his father’s farm and falls in love with Lydia Lensky, a genteel Polish widow his step-daughter Anna who marries his nephew Will and their child Ursula, a woman who works, goes to university and decides not to marry the man she sleeps with.
In The Rainbow you can see the straightforward Edwardian novel readying itself for Modernism in its language and psychological approach (it was published seven years before James Joyce’s Ulysses and 10 before Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway). Prosecutor Herbert Muskett declared that “although there might not be an obscene word to be found in the book, it was in fact a mass of obscenity of thought, idea, and action”. The author’s previous book Sons and Lovers had been banned from public libraries and his publisher Methuen – who would later do everything they could not to take responsibility for the following book in court – demanded two rounds of cuts to The Rainbow.īut it was the very marrow of the book which the authorities objected to when, two months after its publication in September 1915, they seized and suppressed it under the 1857 Obscene Publications Act.
“Tell me the parts you think the publisher will decidedly object to,” he told his friend Violet Meynell in July 1915. Before there was Lady Chatterly’s Lover there was The Rainbow, and D H Lawrence knew that his wonderful book about three generations of a Nottinghamshire family was going to cause trouble.
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