Category: The Rainbow

When English writer D. H. Lawrence’s novel, The Rainbow, was first published in 1915, it was hailed as obscene and Lawrence himself was labeled a pornographer. The book was banned in many quarters while the righteous of the day took great pleasure in making a public display of burning it. It wasn’t available in England and the United States for many years after its publication, except in an “expurgated” version, meaning that somebody went through the book and took out the parts they considered “offensive.”

Readers nowadays will not understand what all the fuss was about when The Rainbow was first published nearly a hundred years ago. We live in a permissive age where any words might be spoken for public consumption; anything might be seen on TV or in movies or written about in magazines, newspapers and books. All the rules, all the taboos, seem to have been lifted, and nothing is sacred anymore. The Rainbow seems very mild by today’s standards. Lawrence only suggests that his characters engage in sexual activity. (He was, possibly, the first “mainstream” English writer to do this; thus all the furor.) His heroine in The Rainbow, Ursula Brangwen, sees her boyfriend (to whom she is engaged but doesn’t marry) naked while he is bathing, sleeps with him in his hotel room while pretending to be his wife, and has outdoor sex with him. There are no steamy details; the sex is only implied. This is no Peyton Place. Any of the words connected with sex are never used.

The Rainbow is a multi-generational story of a fictional English family, the Brangwens. It begins with Tom Brangwen, a gentleman farmer who marries a strangely detached Polish woman named Lydia. She is a widow, older than Tom, with a daughter from her previous marriage named Anna. When Anna is older, she marries her stepfather’s nephew, Will Brangwen. If Anna and Will have nothing else together, they have sexual compatibility; they end up having nine children, the oldest of whom is Ursula. She becomes the focal point of the second half of the novel.

As Ursula Brangwen becomes older, she longs to break free from the conventions and constraints that she believes have held women back for so long. She isn’t content to live as other women of her class have lived. She is a “modern” woman of the early twentieth century. She seeks a teaching career (with disastrous results), a college degree (she fails her final exams), and marriage (she decides she can’t go through with it) to a handsome young military man named Anton Skrebensky, a veteran of the Boer War. After The Rainbow ends, Ursula’s story is continued in the novel Women in Love, which was published in 1920.

Much of The Rainbow is taken up with the interior lives of its characters, meaning that we are constantly being told what they think and how they feel, rather than what they are doing or saying or what they are having for dinner. If this sounds like tedious reading, it isn’t. It isn’t a difficult book to read for those who are so inclined, although a little long at 515 pages.

D.H. Lawrence was plagued by ill health throughout much of his life and died at age 45 of tuberculosis in 1930. If he failed to achieve the acclaim and success that he deserved during his lifetime, he is today hailed as a giant of twentieth century English writing. The Rainbow is one of his most famous and enduring works.

There, on the dusty floorboards, was a piece of paper, folded neatly. A newspaper article from 1941, written in German, alongside a faded picture of two men in Nazi uniforms staring at the camera. I was about to place it back in the box of forgotten things when something in the text jumped out at me. My breath caught in my chest. I know that name.

London, present day. Isla has grown up hearing her beloved grandad’s stories about his life as a child in pre-war Poland and as a young soldier bravely fighting the Germans to protect his people. So she is shocked and heartbroken to find, while collecting photos for his 95th birthday celebration, a picture of her dear grandfather wearing a Nazi uniform. Is everything she thought she knew about him a lie?

Unable to question him due to his advanced dementia, Isla wraps herself in her rainbow-coloured scarf, a memento of his from the war, and begins to hunt for the truth behind the photograph. What she uncovers is more shocking than she could have ever anticipated – a tale of childhood sweethearts torn apart by family duty, and how one young man risked his life, his love and the respect of his own people, to secretly fight for justice from inside the heart of the enemy itself…

An heartbreaking novel of love, betrayal and a secret passed down through a family. Inspired by an incredible true story. Perfect for fans of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, We Were the Lucky Ones and The Alice Network.

A photograph and a colourful scarf are two items found in an attic that send Isla into the past. She thinks the scarf is beautiful and shouldn’t be left to moulder in the attic and wears it. The photograph elicits the totally opposite reaction. Shocked at what she sees, her grandfather in a Nazi uniform, Isla looks for answers. Her grandmother fobs her off with a vague explanation and her grandfather cannot be approached because of his advanced dementia. Isla is unwilling to let the matter drop. She needs to know that the beloved grandfather, who told her heartwarming stories of his childhood and the country of his birth, who fought with the Allies during the war, is not the person in the photograph. And so begins an emotional story that will transport the reader from pre-World War II Poland to the present.

I’d already guessed how Tomasz came to be in a German uniform as the enforced conscription of Polish youths into the German army was known to me. This was the fate of my now 95-year-old father at the age of sixteen years of age. Like Tomasz, he eventually made it to Scotland and joined the Allied fight against the Nazis, parachuting into Holland in 1944. So, I was eager to read The Rainbow but totally unprepared for how emotionally invested I became in Tomasz’s story. The lovely dedication brought tears to my eyes even before I’d plunged into the story proper.

This is a beautifully written story that will tug at your heartstrings from the beginning, especially as one of the characters has dementia. As Isla delves into the past she will uncover a tale of love, sacrifice, survival, courage and loss. There is also a touch of magic as the significance of the rainbow coloured scarf is revealed.

The Rainbow is one of the finest World War II novels I’ve read this year. It is an engrossing and moving experience drawn from the author’s family history and one I highly recommend.

The Rainbow tells the story of three generations of the Brangwen family,between 1840 and 1905. The Brangwens have owned and worked Marsh Farm in Nottinghamshire, England, for generations, and the family includes craftsmen as well as farmers. Tom Brangwen hasn’t much left the Midlands counties of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, where the farm is located.

Tom works the land in near isolation, with only an old woman housekeeper as company. However, one day, the vicar of the local church hires a Polish widow, Lydia Lensky, to be his housekeeper, and Lydia brings with her her young daughter, Anna. After a few months, Tom musters the courage to bring Lydia a bouquet of flowers, and he asks her to be his wife.

From the outside, their marriage is a happy one and Tom is a caring stepfather to Anna. Lydia and Tom, however, find that their differences in culture and language put a strain on their relationship. They find it difficult to connect or be together in the way a married couple should. At one point, Lydia even suggests that Tom should find another woman. They stay together, however.

Eventually, Anna comes of age after a childhood of dreaming about being a queen. When she is eighteen, one of Tom’s nephews, Will, comes to work in the lace factory in nearby Ilkeston. He lives with Tom’s family at Marsh Farm, and Anna and Will fall in love.

Theirs is a rather innocent love, as neither has much experience in romance, but it is sincere, and soon they announce their plans to marry. Tom throws them a large wedding, rents a home for them in the village, and gives them 2,500 pounds as a gift. The married couple spends their first two weeks entirely by themselves, wrapped up in the world that exists onlybetween them. Anna returns from this happy haze first, and Will struggles to re-enter the real world of reality and responsibility.

This continues throughout their marriage. Will struggles to see Anna as anything other than his lover. The real world, however, constantly comes between them, especially when Anna begins having children.

Their youngest daughter is a child named Ursula. She experiences the freedom to explore that the other Brangwens never could, though Ursula continues to feel the pressures from the materialist society that confines her. Ursula is passionate, spiritual, and sensual, and as such, undertakes a series of relationships, including a same-sex love affair with one of her teachers.

Eventually, Ursula enters into a relationship with Anton Skrebensky, a young man of Polish descent in the British Army. Their affair is passionate and extended, lasting happily for many years. Things take a turn, however, when Anton asks Ursula to marry him. She explains that she doesn’t want to be married because she finds the convention too confining. This refusal hurts Anton deeply, and he leaves.

Ursula regrets turning down Anton’s proposal, feeling empty in his absence. She pines for Anton, and at this point, comes to realize that she is pregnant. Her remorse is heightened by this news, but Anton is gone.

Still, she understands that the freedom she thought she couldn’t have as a married woman can now only be achieved if she agrees to marry Anton. At this point, she observes a rainbow in the sky, and takes it to be a sign of a new reality for humanity. The book describes it this way: ‘She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.’Afterward, Ursula sits to write a letter to Anton, asking him to return.

The Rainbow addresses the competing interests of modernity and tradition. The characters across the generations each struggle under the weight of expectations as they feel pulled toward a different sort of life than the one they are leading. In particular, Lawrence critiques the institution of marriage. The relationships he depicts in the novel are all deeply flawed, marriages that exists primarily as a result of function or convenience. The book argues that people should abandon these conventions in favor of following their urges and more animal instincts.

The Rainbow frankly, and at times explicitly, discusses human sexuality and sexual attraction, and that earned the novel an obscenity trial in England in 1915. Unsold copies of the book were seized and burned, though it remained available in the United States.

Critics have praised the novel’s artistry, and have gone on to remark favorably on the book’s depiction of sexual attraction. Most critics also agree that Lawrence’s treatment of convention in the face of modernity is noteworthy.

Lawrence wrote a sequel to The Rainbow, Women in Love, with Ursula as the main character. In that book, she continues her search for emotional and spiritual growth through other relationships.