ABSTRACT
The Rainbow (1915) has its genesis in the years immediately preceding the Great War. It was suppressed within two months of its publication in Britain and the publisher, Methuen, was prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857. The novel had been printed only after considerable revision and rewriting on Lawrence’s part, and went through a number of drafts, identified first as ‘The Sisters’. Altered, it became ‘The Wedding Ring’ which, like ‘The Sisters’, anticipated much of the content of Women in Love. Finally The Rainbow was published despite certain reservations about Lawrence’s uses of language, and ‘sexual morbidities’ (R 484; a judgement echoed by T.S. Eliot in After Strange Gods), reservations which would surface again in Lawrence criticism.
