The Rainbow

The Rainbow is a novel by the English writer D. H. Lawrence, first published by Methuen in 1915.

The book follows three generations of the Brangwen family, farmers and craftsmen who live around the Erewash Valley on the border of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, and it covers roughly sixty-five years from the 1840s to 1905. Its subject is the struggle of individual people to grow and to be fulfilled inside a society that has fixed arrangements for them, and the love relationships of each generation are the way the novel examines it: the marriages, the attractions and the dissatisfactions are all set against the agricultural and industrial life of the valley. The book was prosecuted for obscenity on publication and withdrawn, and the sequel, Women in Love, appeared in 1920. Lawrence wrote it while he was living abroad and drawing on the Midlands childhood he had already used in Sons and Lovers.

It is one of the novels that made his name in the decade before the war, and it has been read ever since as a study of a family and a period at the same time.