Before there was Lady Chatterly’s Lover there was The Rainbow, and D H Lawrence knew that his wonderful book about three generations of a Nottinghamshire family was going to cause trouble. “Tell me the parts you think the publisher will decidedly object to,” he told his friend Violet Meynell in July 1915. The author’s previous book Sons and Lovers had been banned from public libraries and his publisher Methuen – who would later do everything they could not to take responsibility for the following book in court – demanded two rounds of cuts to The Rainbow.



But it was the very marrow of the book which the authorities objected to when, two months after its publication in September 1915, they seized and suppressed it under the 1857 Obscene Publications Act. Prosecutor Herbert Muskett declared that “although there might not be an obscene word to be found in the book, it was in fact a mass of obscenity of thought, idea, and action”.



In The Rainbow you can see the straightforward Edwardian novel readying itself for Modernism in its language and psychological approach (it was published seven years before James Joyce’s Ulysses and 10 before Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway). Moving from 1840 to 1905, it tells the story of the Brangwen family: the artistically inclined but unintellectual Tom who succeeds to his father’s farm and falls in love with Lydia Lensky, a genteel Polish widow; his step-daughter Anna who marries his nephew Will; and their child Ursula, a woman who works, goes to university and decides not to marry the man she sleeps with.



The novel’s outlook evolves as it moves through the Victorian era. For Tom Brangwen’s generation sex happens, but between paragraphs. For Anna and Will, bodies are alluded to and desires described. By the time Ursula Brangwen is a young woman, sex is frequent and directly addressed.



In one passage, which was declared “unfit for family fiction” in a review by James Douglas for The Star and singled out in the courtroom, Ursula begins a lesbian affair with her schoolteacher Winifred, who at one point carries her naked into the sea:



Ursula lay still in her mistress’s arms, her forehead against the beloved, maddening breast.

“I shall put you in,’ said Winifred.

But Ursula twined her body about her mistress.





At this point female homosexuality was publicly unthinkable; there hadn’t even been a law written to punish it. When the manuscript readers from Methuen were called before the court, they pleaded obliviousness to what was going on.

DH Lawrence Credit: Getty Images/Hulton Archive



But ultimately the inclusion of this scene would have made little difference. The book’s territory and method were at fault, and, writing during the First World War, Lawrence had picked the wrong time to innovate. No self-respecting English person of the era would have admitted the accuracy of Lawrence’s depiction of human nature, and his thorough portrait of the pettiness and petulance of lovers.

30 great opening lines in literature



Characters spend most of the novel wanting to wound each other out of sheer neediness: Anna is jealous that she can’t feel the religious reverence her husband feels and “wanted to destroy it in him”. Will resents the fact Anna has time for anyone but him, makes her feel guilty for it, then is “mad with gratefulness” when she forgives his sulking. Tom Brangwen feels unloved and wants to have an affair, and his wife Lydia seems to read his thoughts, which forces Tom to confront his own character even though it leaves him feeling violated: “He stared in wonder at his own wife as she told him his own heart so callously”. This is how the first readers of The Rainbow must have felt, and they despised it, especially at a time when public morality was presented as being about being good, upstanding and pulling together in a crisis.



The New Statesman’s reviewer JC Squire deemed the very probing of characters’ thoughts to be under “the spell of German psychologists”, implying an anti-British slant to the novel. (The book might even have been suppressed purely because Lawrence had a German wife: Home Office notes prove that the government had a file on Frieda Lawrence even before the trial.)



The judge Sir John Dickinson said the book “had no right to exist in the wind of war”, going on to infer that Lawrence’s writing made a mockery of the life which British men were laying down for their country. Dickinson’s only son had died at the front only weeks before the November trial.



Lawrence wasn't present at the trial – he wasn't even told it was taking place, and heard about it through newspaper reports. Some 1011 copies of The Rainbow were burned by a hangman outside the Royal Exchange.

A century on, The Rainbow’s emotional frankness moves, shocks and exhilarates: it still has the power to tell us our own hearts. Reading it now, we again feel found out as Tom Brangwen did in front of Lydia Lensky: fully discerned, and a bit furious that we have been so callously exposed.