The Rainbow

Abstract

LAWRENCE took a lot of trouble over The Rainbow. He wrote it in 1913–14, in several drafts, and it was published in September, 1915, only to be suppressed on November 13. He felt strongly that it was something new, and the letters which refer to it are of exceptional critical interest. The earliest reference is in a letter of March 11, 1913, to Edward Garnett:

I am a damned curse unto myself. I’ve written rather more than half of a most fascinating (to me) novel. But nobody will ever dare to publish it. I feel I could knock my head against the wall. Yet I love and adore this new book. It’s all crude as yet, like one of Tony’s clumsy prehistorical beasts—most cumbersome and floundering but I think it’s great—so new, so really a stratum deeper than I think anybody has ever gone, in a novel. But there, you see, it’s my latest. It is all analytical—quite unlike Sons and Lovers, not a bit visualised.