The Rainbow

D. H. Lawrence expected The Rainbow to have ‘a bit of a fight’ before it was accepted, but ‘The fight will have to be made, that is all’. He started ‘The Sisters’ in March 1913, wrote four different versions and claimed to have discarded ‘quite a thousand pages’ before completing The Rainbow in May 1915. His literary mentor Edward Garnett was critical of the second version; Methuen acccepted the third version in 1914, only to return it when war was declared. Lawrence rewrote yet again, dividing the book into two (the second part would become Women in Love), but even while he revised the typescript, he realised that Methuen would object to sections and agreed to ‘take out sentences and phrases’, but not ‘paragraphs or pages’. Nevertheless The Rainbow was suppressed, just over a month after publication, in November 1915. The American publisher would make thirteen further cuts and ‘dribble out’ the book quietly. In 1930 the British government would again consider suppressing a new printing of The Rainbow. Professor Mark Kinkead-Weekes gives the composition history and collates the surviving states of the text to assess the damage done to Lawrence’s great novel, and to provide a text as close to that which the author wrote as is now possible. The final manuscript, revisions in the typescript and the first edition are recorded in full in the Textual apparatus so the reader can follow the development of the novel and evaluate what outside interference may have done to it. Also included are Explanatory notes to historical references and allusions, and an interior chronology of the book itself.