D. H. Lawrence: The Rainbow

The Rainbow and Women in Love were originally intended to form one novel entitled The Sisters, which was begun in 1913 when Lawrence was living in Italy, but as the novel developed across 1913-14 – whilst Lawrence and Frieda moved from Italy to Germany to England and back to Italy again – its scope grew so much that in the autumn of 1914 Lawrence decided to create two novels. The Rainbow was finished in March 1915 and published on 30th September 1915 and is one of his major achievements, radical in both form and content. It is clearly an attempt to take the novel into new territory, breaking with the conventions of nineteenth-century realism and furthering the exploration of human desire which had already cau