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    The Rainbow
    The Rainbow
    The Rainbow
    Audiobook18 hours

    The Rainbow

    Written by D.H. Lawrence

    Narrated by Wanda McCaddon

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Set in the rural midlands of England, The Rainbow revolves around three generations of the Brangwen family over a period of more than sixty years, setting them against the emergence of modern England. When Tom Brangwen marries a Polish widow and adopts her daughter as his own, he is unprepared for the conflict and passion that erupt. Suffused with biblical imagery, The Rainbow addresses searching human issues in a setting of precise and vivid detail.

    In The Rainbow, D. H. Lawrence challenged the customary limitations of language and convention to carry into the structures of his prose the fascination with boundaries and space that characterize the entire novel. A visionary novel, considered to be one of Lawrence's finest, it explores the complex sexual and psychological relationships between men and women in an increasingly industrialized world.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateDec 24, 2010
    ISBN9781452670300
    Author

    D.H. Lawrence

    David Herbert Lawrence was born on 11th September 1881 in Eastwood, a small mining village in Nottinghamshire, in the English Midlands. Despite ill health as a child and a comparatively disadvantageous position in society, he became a teacher in 1908, and took up a post in a school in Croydon, south of London. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1911, and from then until his death he wrote feverishly, producing poetry, novels, essays, plays travel books and short stories, while travelling around the world, settling for periods in Italy, New Mexico and Mexico. He married Frieda Weekley in 1914 and died of tuberculosis in 1930.

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    Reviews for The Rainbow

    3.5/5

    518 ratings26 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Struggled through this til the end but really didn't enjoy it all. I prefer a non flowering style of writing and this was just too over the top for my liking.
    • 3/5
      Een ruwe diamant: structuur rammelt en soms zijn er onlogische afleidingen maar diverse passages over man-vrouw-relatie zijn zeer sterk, heel herkenbaar, namelijk de eeuwige strijd, vergeefse pogingen om in elkaar op te gaan. Onderliggend: onvrede met onnatuurlijke ontwikkeling van de beschaving, cfr industrie; natuurgevoelen in naaktdansen en naaktwandelingen. Zeer zwak, geforceerd einde. Vrouwelijke figuren voeren bovenhand: Lydia, Anna, Ursula; alleen Tom Brangwen sr houdt stand als mannelijk archetype
    • 5/5
      Lawrence at his best, holding together a tender narrative to portray the development of three generations as an ouvre to understanding homo religiosis.
    • 5/5
      I took a full semester on D.H. Lawrence and read ALL of his works. The stack of books was taller than me. Luckily, this was the only class I took! The Rainbow is my favorite out of all his works, although I'm at a point in my life where I think I will revisiting the last tales he wrote while living in the Southwest and painting.
    • 2/5
      I've sat on this one for a couple of days, because I honestly don't know what to rate it at, and what to think of it. So, bear with me as I argue myself into some sort of rating here.

      The first thing that I have to point out is, the language and actual writing here is quite beautiful. Especially considering it's a book that's much more tell than show. We're inside the characters' heads so much that Lawrence has no choice but to tell us everything, but I believe that to be much more a product of the times than anything. But the word choice, the sentences, the deliberate repetitions to push a point...all quite lovely.

      So, now...on to the stuff that, likely in a shorter novel, wouldn't have bothered me quite as much, for a three-generation spanning story, these things tended to get to me after a while...

      This is a highly ambitious novel, spanning the lives of three generations of Brangwen family members. To do that, Lawrence has to cover a lot of ground, and a hell of a lot of years. Therein lies my first complaint. Lawrence will give us pages of cruising at 50 000 feet, lightly skipping over months or years of a character's life, then, without warning, drop into a specific day. After a while, I found this a bit off-putting.

      At the same time, Lawrence (and yes, I know this was the accepted style of the times, but still) jumped from character to character to character's point of view with no warnings and no breaks.

      Third, while this was a novel about growing up and finding acceptance with one's self and one's lot in life, I found that there was precious little actual dynamic events that brought on the acceptance.

      And don't even get me started on Ursula's will she or won't she marry plot toward the end. I actually shouted out, "Make up your mind, for fuck sakes!"

      And then, there's the stunningly abrupt ending, as though Lawrence simply said, "Fair enough, I've reached my page count, time to close this puppy down."

      In the end, I'll give it four stars for the language and writing, and then take two off that for all the stuff above. Definitely not my favourite Lawrence, and it makes me rather nervous to tackle the follow up, Sons and Lovers.
    • 3/5
      A character study of Ursula Brangwine, and her personal growth process, at least according to Lawrence's standards. It shows a good deal about the Middle Class life of provincial Edwardian England. Later feminists do not rate this book highly. Originally published in 1915, it was a groundbreakingng effort.
    • 3/5
      It took me longer than I expected to finish this book, in part because it took a long while for the story to get interesting. Three generations of a family are depicted in this novel, and the last portion - concerning Ursula - is the most famous and interesting. A lot of the book is repetitive, with family members struggling continually with the same trials and life neither improving or devolving for anyone. I will say, however, that mid-way through the book, I checked the original publication date and was surprised - this book, with its discussion of sex, a lesbian affair, and a woman's desire for a life beyond marriage and family, was definitely ahead of its time and pieces of the story feel as through they could apply to life today.
    • 4/5
      Very palatable and romantic. I would say this is among D.H Lawrence's best. I read Lady Chatterley's Lover and did not enjoy it-- but this turned me around in my suppositions and impressions of the author. It was well worth the read and the language wrought was poetic and lucid. I was not disappointed in the least. Nicely done.
    • 4/5
      (Original Review, 2002-06-10)Lawrence is "uneven," but of the four novels I've read by him, "The Rainbow" is the best. I read "Sons and Lovers" at the British Council. I loved it at 15, but loved it far less 2 years later. I liked "Lady Chatterley's Lover" more than I thought I would, but that maybe because of all the scorn I'd heard poured on it before I read the book. I read "The Rainbow" before I read "Women in Love", and found the first of the diptych far superior to the second. Women in Love often seemed to me to read like Lawrence at his overblown, blood flowing, loin thrusting worst. It disappointed me, in large part, because I thought it would be more like "The Rainbow", which seems a far more measured book to me. I agree with what a number of people have already said about Lawrence's depiction of nature in "The Rainbow", but it also seems to me a novel that could only have been written by an author from a working-class background. I can't think of another novel from that period that captures so well the complexities of working-class life, the alliances, and differences, between working-class people, and the difficulties and tensions experienced by those who make it out of the working-class into a middle-class life. It's those moments in the novel that stood out for me, and they are the reasons I see it as the best of Lawrence's novels.I'm among those cited in this article who devoured DHL in adolescence and found, on returning to his novels decades later, that they seemed almost unreadable in their fevered emotional immaturity. On second reading, the most interesting thing to me about “The Rainbow” and “Women in Love” was DHL's unique dialogue. I finally decided that his dialogue is written as if the internal thoughts of the characters were literally printed on the paper, as opposed to the more realistic way in which we translate those thoughts into everyday speech. Clearly, it’s a matter of taste but if nothing else.
    • 3/5
      Enjoyed this slow meander through the three generations of the Brangwen family.
    • 3/5
      “Nevertheless, it was begun now, this passion, and must go on, the passion of Ursula to know her own maximum self, limited and so defined against him. She could limit and define herself against him, the male, she could be her maximum self, female, oh female, triumphant for one moment in exquisite assertion against the male, in supreme contradistinction to the male.”King of the comma splice. It took a bit to adjust reading this aloud, with all the odd breaks, clauses that had no right being connected, and repetitive phrases more redundant than redundant phrases repeating. Someone should’ve told Mr. Lawrence that switching the word order or changing the tense doesn’t necessarily make the idea any more novel. God knows I’m a massive employer of epizeuxes and anaphora, but Lawrence almost seems at times to use these devices in search of a different word, and just kept running with it, running and running, massively employing those devices. It’s kind of fucking annoying. And the hot and cold and hot again, cold again relationships—for all three generations, mind you—is equally irritating. However, there are moments of dark and brilliant beauty, both—the dissolution before the rainbow and the realization of one’s own burgeoning strength after seeing that spectral arc in the sky. I wanted to like this more. At times, I loved it. At others, the wife and I groaned together. I’d so much rather moan than groan. Hey, wait . . . I think Lawrence would’ve appreciated that distinction. Whatever the impact or lack thereof, ebbing and cascading all the way to the end of the book, I appreciated his consistency for such odd stylization; even if Stendhal did it better. But then again, I’d hardly describe anything I’ve read by Stendhal as being beautiful, whereas Lawrence . . . yeah, so there is undeniably a power to it all.
    • 2/5
      2½ stars for the audiobook edition narrated by Paul Slack.

      I didn't care for this book but if you like D.H. Lawrence, you probably would like this. His writing style & main themes irritate me so my main feeling on finishing this is relief that I am done. The characters don't seem like any people I have ever met & Lawrence has some strange ideas about sex & women...

      For me, the most interesting parts were when Ursula Brangwen is working as a school teacher (without any kind of training!). Having taught myself, I was amused that some things apparently never change, such as the principal/headmaster's fear of pushy &/or complaining parents. Other aspects have clearly changed for the better - no more canings!
    • 3/5
      Relationships viewed as power struggles & love hate affairs, all through the prism of class.Read Mar 2005
    • 3/5
      Three books into working my way chronologically through Lawrence’s novels, and he’s yet to move outside of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire (I’ve also read the later Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which also takes place in Notts). The Rainbow follows the Brangwen family through several generations, from the 1840s through to 1905. It starts with the family patriarch before eventually settling on Ursula, who comes of age at the turn of the century, is fiercely ambitious, and ends up teaching at a local school. It’s a more structured novel than The White Peacock and Sons and Lovers, although only inasmuch as the passage of years provides a framework for the story – it still has a tendency to randomly move from one member of the family to another, and it’s not always clear where the novel’s focus lies. But Lawrence’s descriptive prose, particularly in regard to the landscape, shines; and he brings his usual detailed, if occasionally heavy-handed, eye to the emotional landscapes of his cast. I set out to work my way through Lawrence’s oeuvre because a read of Lady Chatterley’s Lover persuaded me I’d been missing out by avoiding him, and because my father was a huge Lawrence fan. The more I’ve read, the more I too have become a fan of his writing – and collecting the books is fun too, of course.
    • 4/5
      Hm, this one is a bit of a puzzle for me. At first, I was engrossed in it, both the style of writing and the story. But after a while, probably about the halfway point, I was no longer enjoying myself. It was a bit like going on one of those spinning rides at an amusement park and realizing you're starting to feel queasy, but you just have to stick it out to the end.But that's getting ahead of myself. The book itself is a chronicle of multiple generations of the Brangwen family in England. People marry, or pursue relationships and find those relationships mostly incomprehensible. This is something I liked in the early going - the way that Lawrence describes concrete things through abstract language. It's like an impressionist painting in words. Full sentences, with subjects and verbs? Not required. Repeating words in close proximity to each other? If that's the word Lawrence wants, he's going to use it. Doesn't matter if he just used it in the previous sentence. Thesauri are for the weak.After a couple of generations of Brangwens had come to maturity, I was less enamored with Lawrence's style and began wanting some clear sentences that said what was actually going on. At one point, obviously the word repetition game had gotten to me, too, because I just wrote "fecund fecund fecund ICK." So, overall, I came out of this feeling reminded of those relationships where every little quirk your beloved has is adorable, but eventually you start hating exactly those same adorable little traits. I wouldn't actually say I ended up hating the book, or Lawrence, but the first blush of attraction has faded. Recommended for: people who don't say "my 4-year-old could paint that" at abstract art exhibits, fans of Terence Malick filmsQuote: One evening, suddenly, he saw the tiny, living thing rolling naked in the mother's lap, and he was sick, it was so utterly helpless and vulnerable and extraneous; in a world of hard surfaces and varying altitudes, it lay vulnerable and naked at every point.
    • 3/5
      David Lodge's blurb for this is: "Lawrence is the most Dostoevskian of English novelists." He means that both sides of an ideological dispute get their say; here, individual vs community, religion vs materialism, idealism vs realism all get played out in the consciousness of individual characters. They occasionally talk to each other, but mainly they feel or think in a rather disconnected and puzzling manner. Lodge might also have said D.H. was Dostoevskian in the sense that he desperately needs an editor, that his books are repetitive (sometimes interestingly, sometimes mindlessly), and that his characters are less characters and more personifications of specific emotions, which, in the face of all my English Lit training (i.e., demands that we not trace books back to the author's mind), I will say are probably leftover from the author's adolescence. In short, if you want a picture of a world in which everyone is either a robot or a teenager, this is a pretty good depiction. That doesn't mean that robots and teenagers aren't interesting. Just that sometimes I really wanted a rational, free adult to have their say.
    • 3/5
      This one was okay. If you’re looking for a classic English novel there are a lot better ones to choose from. My main complaint is that there would be a whole section devoted to one generation, but once you moved onto the next section with the next generation there would hardly be any mention of the first set of characters. At one point there was mention of one of the characters from the first section, only to let you know that they had died two years prior. It seemed really abrupt, like Lawrence got sick of the characters he’d written about and wanted to focus on and introduce some new ones – reader be damned! I guess [Women in Love] is a sequel devoted to two of the younger Brangwens so I’ll be reading that at some point to what happens to them.
    • 3/5
      I thought that the first half, describing the early life of Anna, was great. Through 'Anna Victorix', I would have said that this was one of the best books I had ever read. The writing was beautiful and very moving at times. The characters were very sympathetic and, in this book, that mattered greatly for me. The second half, which described the early life of Ursula was not as satisfying. There were wonderful scenes and some more beautiful writing, but the storyline seemed awkward and forced at times. At the end, Ursula carries much of the weight of communicating the author's view of industrial society, but she is so changable and relies so much of emotion that she is not a reliable, or maybe just not a convincing, voice by the end.
    • 4/5
      The Rainbow tells the story of three generations of the Brangwen family, starting in 1840, and ending (roughly) near the time Lawrence wrote the book, 1915. Lawrence was very open in this novel about homosexuality, infidelity, and sex prior to marriage (on the beach no less); while he does not explicitly describe too much of this beyond kissing, groping, and allusions to what’s happening (e.g. abandoning “the moral position” and seeking “gratification pure and simple”… hmm the imagination turns…), all of this was shocking to readers of the day and the book was banned shortly after being published.One aspect of the novel is to show the similarities in the relationships between men and women over the generations, and to reveal them as having an undercurrent, a hidden struggle and battle beneath the surface. The more dominant aspect is to show the women characters becoming stronger and more assertive over time, and I wonder how much of the shock to readers came from Lawrence expressing the ideas that they could vote, gain independence through jobs in a “man’s world”, opt for a physical relationship with a man or a woman instead of marriage, and express chauvinism in the Bible (“It is impudence to say that Woman was made out of a Man’s body…when every man was born of woman. What impdudence men have, what arrogance!”). In the expression of their sexual needs over the generations, it’s an interesting progression, from “She never wanted to kiss him back. In her idea, the man kissed, and the woman examined in her soul the kisses she had received.” to “I’m not satisfied with you. Paul used to come to me and take me like a man does. You only leave me alone or take me like your cattle, quickly, to forget me again…” to open admiration for a man’s body, and the liberation of “She took off her clothes, and made him take off all his, and they ran over the smooth, moonless turf…”. The male characters struggle to keep up.Lawrence believed that sexual union was a gateway to connecting with the larger cosmos, and had eloped to Italy with Frieda, the wife of a friend. She was strong and passionate, and undoubtedly helped fuel the novel.I love Lawrence for his ability to create indelible images. Some examples of this are Anna not being able to control her laughter in the church while listening to her future husband Will singing, Will picking up a young girl and making moves on her in a dark area of the park before going home to passionate sex with his wife, Anna’s sinuous nude dancing while pregnant, Ursula and Ingrid kissing each other while skinny-dipping , and Ursula facing a class of 50-60 kids who become openly defiant to the point of throwing rocks at her in the street, until she canes the hell out of one of the worst offenders.Lawrence’s playfulness with words and his phrasing is clearly modern, though sometimes he is a little overwrought and repetitive. I may be ‘rounding up’ just a bit on the review score and your mileage may vary.Quotes:On desire:“He wished he had a hundred men’s energies, with which to enjoy her. He wished he were a cat, to lick her with a rough, grating, lascivious tongue. He wanted to wallow in her, bury himself in her flesh, cover himself over with her flesh.”On education:“What good was this place, this college? What good was Anglo-Saxon, when one only learned it in order to answer examination questions, in order that one should have a higher commercial value later on? She was sick with this long service at the inner commercial shrine. Yet what else was there? Was life all this, and this only? Everywhere, everything was debased to the same service. Everything went to produce vulgar things, to encumber material life.”On emotion in the moment:“As she sat looking out at the tender sea, with its lovely, swift glimmer, the sob rose in her breast, till she caught her lip suddenly under her teeth, and the tears were forcing themselves from her. And in her very sob, she laughed. Why did she cry? She did not want to cry. It was so beautiful that she laughed. It was so beautiful that she cried.”On religion:“They took religion and rid it of its dogmas, its falsehoods. Winifred humanised it all. Gradually it dawned upon Ursula that all the religion she knew was but a particular clothing to a human aspiration. The aspiration was the real thing – the clothing was a matter almost of national taste or need. The Greeks had a naked Apollo, the Christians a white-robed Christ, the Buddhists a royal prince, the Egyptians their Osiris. Religions were local and religion was universal. Christianity was a local branch. There was as yet no assimilation of local religions into universal religion.”On sex:“All the shameful things of the body revealed themselves to him now with a sort of sinister, tropical beauty. All the shameful, natural and unnatural acts of sensual voluptuousness which he and the woman partook of together, created together, they had their heavy beauty and their delight. Shame, what was it? It was part of extreme delight. It was that part of delight of which man is usually afraid. Why afraid? The secret, shameful things are most terribly beautiful.”
    • 3/5
      I'm only part way through this and I feel like somehow I'm getting a lot out of it, but with no need to read further. For once this isn't quite a criticism. The writing is what I'm enjoying - certain evocations are just beautiful. However it's starting to feel repetitive, the plot is devoid of any suspense. It's a real partial masterpiece for me but the bits that are good make it worth a go. Maybe I'll finish it one day, maybe not.
    • 5/5
      I don't agree with Lawrence's embattled view of the sexes, but this is such a satisfying read, following the Brangwen family through three generations.The first chapter is "How Tom Brangwen married a Polish lady". Irresistible. To read it is to see the North Midland families of the 1891 or 1901 census come alive and go about their daily lives.
    • 3/5
      Een ruwe diamant: structuur rammelt en soms zijn er onlogische afleidingen maar diverse passages over man-vrouw-relatie zijn zeer sterk, heel herkenbaar, namelijk de eeuwige strijd, vergeefse pogingen om in elkaar op te gaan. Onderliggend: onvrede met onnatuurlijke ontwikkeling van de beschaving, cfr industrie; natuurgevoelen in naaktdansen en naaktwandelingen. Zeer zwak, geforceerd einde. Vrouwelijke figuren voeren bovenhand: Lydia, Anna, Ursula; alleen Tom Brangwen sr houdt stand als mannelijk archetype
    • 4/5
      The Rainbow is such a profoundly weird work; I know of nothing quite like it in English literature. A multi-generational epic of sensuality and consciousness set in rural England, the novel traces the lives and of several members, differing in nationality, gender, age, and social class, of the Brangwen family. The prose is hypnotizing, biblical, repetitive, chthonic, sumptuous and utterly, inexhaustibly original. I think Lawrence set out to write about the movement of blood in our veins more than the thoughts in our heads, and it is remarkable how far he succeeded.
    • 2/5
      Lawrence's knack for nailing his female characters is astounding. I said to myself more than once, "I know that feeling and never could've put it into words". However, there were a few places that the details were redundant to the point of tedium, and I skimmed through the rest of the paragraph.

      The ending, like Lady Chatterly, was perfect, though not at all the way I wanted it to end.
    • 3/5
      To be honest, I read about 3/4 of this book, then skipped to the last chapter. I love Lawrence, but could not handle any more of his lengthy sentences. This book (unless I missed some very important part) is about life. About the choices we have, and the difficulty in choosing the "right" path. Also about having to except things and people as they are.
    • 5/5
      Lawrence at his best, holding together a tender narrative to portray the development of three generations as an ouvre to understanding homo religiosis.