The Rainbow

Lawrence is the most Dostoevskian of English novelists, in whose best work conflicting ideological positions are brought into play and set up against each other in dialogue that is never simply or finally resolved – David Lodge
No writer since Lawrence has been so openly governed by what seems like powerful personal likes and dislikes, grievances, and by what appear to many as untenable prejudices – Amit Chauduri
What astonished me reading it this time round is the iconoclastic modernity of the novel… the sense of daring experiment.. I had entirely forgotten what drastic steps Lawrence was taking with character, for instance. Or with narrative (the novel proceeds cyclically). When this is combined with sexual overtness and a revolutionary call for the individual to achieve “Me-ness” in opposition to the nation, industry and war, we have a book that, appearing as it did in 1915, seemed genuinely disturbing – Adam Thorpe * Guardian *

D.H. Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence was born on 11 September 1885 in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire. His father was a miner and his mother was a schoolteacher. In 1906, he took up a scholarship at Nottingham University to study to be a teacher. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1911. Lawrence gave up teaching in 1911 due to illness.

In 1912, he met and fell in love with Frieda Weekley, a married woman, and they eloped to Germany together. They were married in 1914 and spent the rest of their lives travelling around the world.

In 1915, Lawrence published The Rainbow, which was banned in Great Britain for obscenity. Women in Love, which continues the story of the Brangwen family begun in The Rainbow, was finished by Lawrence in 1916 but not published until 1920. Another of Lawrence’s most famous works, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, was privately printed in Florence in 1928 but was not published in Britain until 1960, when it was the subject of an unsuccessful court case brought against it for obscenity.

As well as novels, Lawrence also wrote in a variety of other genres, and his poetry, criticism, and travel books remain highly regarded. He was also a keen painter. D.H. Lawrence died in France on 2 March 1930.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk was born in Canada in 1967 and moved to the United Kingdom in 1974. She is the author of nine novels and three works of non-fiction. She has won and been shortlisted for numerous prizes. Her novel Outline (2014) was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Baileys Prize, the Giller Prize, and the Canadian Governor General’s Award. It was also picked by the New York Times as one of the top ten books of the year. Its follow-up, Transit (2016), was chosen as a book of the year by the Observer, New Statesman, Guardian, and Spectator.

In 2003, Rachel Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of ‘20 Best of Young British Novelists’. In 2015, her version of Euripides’ Medea was put on at the Almeida Theatre, directed by Rupert Goold, and was shortlisted for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.

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