Lawrence could write such deeply complex and intellectually compelling women characters. Arguably, of all male writers, only Shakespeare and D. On the way to this fraught decision, she poses some extraordinary questions.

In the end Ursula turns her back on conventional marriage and chooses her right to self-discovery. We come to experience Ursula as a young woman facing all of life’s big questions: marriage, love, economic independence, the place of women in society. The portrait of Ursula is something that Virginia Woolf could only have dreamt of writing. While the first half concentrates on the generations of the Brangwen family, the second half comes to focus on the eldest daughter of Will and Anna Brangwen, Ursula. He seems to have no literary antecedents. Conventional literary forms could not contain him, and hence he comes virtually born into literature as a complete self-invention. In this Lawrence is unique and completely modern. His subject matter is individual consciousness and the friction caused when it rubs up against society, twenty-first century progress and changing gender roles. Every page teems with ideas, complex psychology and a poetry of the body and nature. In The Rainbow, Lawrence's literary consciousness is so large and powerful it almost overflows even the novel’s huge capacity. Words came tumbling out of him like a great running river. Lawrence is renowned for his mammoth literary output: letters, novels, plays, short stories and poetry. Three generations of the Brangwen family, their marriages, love, hates and turbulent inner lives, are described in Lawrence’s abundant, cornucopian prose-poetry. The Rainbow, if one were looking for a conventional description, would call the novel a family saga. An obscenity trial ensued, causing a five year delay before Women in Love could made its appearance. Upon publication, The Rainbow quickly got itself into hot water for its candid descriptions of love, sensuality and the body. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920) were both originally written as one novel, but split into two at the suggestion of his publisher. The narrative takes the reader through three generations of the Brangwen family, and finally comes to focus closely on Ursula Brangwen, a universal feminist character that poses the great questions of modern humanity.ĭ. Lawrence asks the question, ‘How to become oneself’.

The rainbow 1915