20th Century British Literature Classics Fiction Literature Novels Romance

Brangwen Family #1

The Rainbow

Name: The Rainbow
Rating: 3.7 (21620 reviews)
Author: D.H. Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence January 1, 1915

3.7 21.6k Ratings

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Synopsis

D. H. Lawrence’s controversial classic, The Rainbow, follows the lives and loves of three generations of the Brangwen family between 1840 and 1905. Their tempestuous relationships are played out against a backdrop of change as they witness the arrival of industrialization – the only constant being their unending attempts to grasp a higher form of existence symbolized by the persistent, unifying motif of the “rainbow”. Lawrence’s fourth novel, a prequel to Women in Love, is an invigorating, absorbing tale about the undying determination of the human soul.

Books similar to The Rainbow

Sons and Lovers

★ 3.64

D.H. Lawrence

"She was a brazen hussy."

"She wasn't. And she was pretty, wasn't she?"

"I didn't look ... And tell your girls, my son, that when they're running after you, they're not to come and ask your mother for you - tell them that - brazen baggages you meet at dancing classes"

The marriage of Gertrude and Walter Morel has become a battleground. Repelled by her uneducated and sometimes violent husband, delicate Gertrude devotes her life to her children, especially to her sons, William and Paul - determined they will not follow their father into working down the coal mines. But conflict is evitable when Paul seeks to escape his mother's suffocating grasp through relationships with women his own age. Set in Lawrence's native Nottinghamshire, Sons and Lovers is a highly autobiographical and compelling portrayal of childhood, adolescence and the clash of generations.

Of Human Bondage

★ 4.16

W. Somerset Maugham

From a tormented orphan with a clubfoot, Philip Carey grows into an impressionable young man with a voracious appetite for adventure and knowledge. His cravings take him to Paris at age eighteen to try his hand at art, then back to London to study medicine. But even so, nothing can sate his nagging hunger for experience. Then he falls obsessively in love, embarking on a disastrous relationship that will change his life forever.…

Marked by countless similarities to Maugham’s own life, his masterpiece is “not an autobiography,” as the author himself once contended, “but an autobiographical novel; fact and fiction are inexorably mingled; the emotions are my own.”

A Handful of Dust

★ 3.89

Evelyn Waugh

Laced with cynicism and truth, "A Handful of Dust" satirizes a certain stratum of English life where all the characters have wealth, but lack practically every other credential. Murderously urbane, it depicts the breakup of a marriage in the London gentry, where the errant wife suffers from terminal boredom, and becomes enamoured of a social parasite and professional luncheon-goer.

Women in Love

★ 3.66

D.H. Lawrence

Widely regarded as D. H. Lawrence's greatest novel, Women in Love is both a lucid account of English society before the First World War, and a brilliant evocation of the inexorable power of human desire.

Women in Love continues where The Rainbow left off, with the third generation of Brangwens: Ursula Brangwen, now a teacher at Beldover, a mining town in the Midlands, and her sister Gudrun, who has returned from art school in London. The focus of the novel is primarily on their relationships, Ursula's with Rupert Birkin, a school inspector, and Gudrun's with industrialist Gerald Crich, and later with a sculptor, Loerke. Quintessentially modernist, Women in Love is one of Lawrence's most extraordinary, innovative and unsettling works.

The End of the Affair

★ 3.9

Graham Greene

"A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses a moment of experience from which to look ahead..."

"This is a record of hate far more than of love," writes Maurice Bendrix in the opening passages of The End of the Affair, and it is a strange hate indeed that compels him to set down the retrospective account of his adulterous affair with Sarah Miles.

Now, a year after Sarah's death, Bendrix seeks to exorcise the persistence of his passion by retracing its course from obsessive love to love-hate. At first, he believes he hates Sarah and her husband, Henry. Yet as he delves deeper into his emotional outlook, Bendrix's hatred shifts to the God he feels has broken his life, but whose existence at last comes to recognize.

Tender Is the Night

★ 3.77

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Set on the French Riviera in the late 1920s, Tender Is the Night is the tragic romance of the young actress Rosemary Hoyt and the stylish American couple Dick and Nicole Diver. A brilliant young psychiatrist at the time of his marriage, Dick is both husband and doctor to Nicole, whose wealth goads him into a lifestyle not his own, and whose growing strength highlights Dick's harrowing demise. A profound study of the romantic concept of character, Tender Is the Night is lyrical, expansive, and hauntingly evocative.

The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

★ 3.67

Ford Madox Ford

"A Tale of Passion," as its subtitle declares, The Good Soldier relates the complex social and sexual relationships between two couples, one English, one American, and the growing awareness by the American narrator John Dowell of the intrigues and passions behind their orderly Edwardian facade. It is the attitude of Dowell, his puzzlement, his uncertainty, and the seemingly haphazard manner of his narration that make the book so powerful and mysterious. Despite its catalogue of death, insanity, and despair, the novel has many comic moments, and has inspired the work of several distinguished writers, including Graham Greene. This is the only annotated edition available.

Howards End

★ 3.96

E.M. Forster

Howards End is considered by many to be E. M. Forster’s masterpiece. First published in 1910, this beguiling and completely captivating tale explores social conventions, codes of conduct, and relationships in turn-of-the-century Edwardian England. The story revolves around three families: the Wilcoxes, rich capitalists with a fortune made in the colonies; the half-German Schlegel siblings, whose cultural pursuits have much in common with the Bloomsbury Group—a loose collective of friends and relatives who were united by an abiding belief in the importance of the arts; and the Basts, an impoverished young couple from a lower-class background. A chance encounter, impetuous youth, love, and ambition play into the inheritance of Howards End, the Wilcox’s charming country home.

Howards End was adapted as a film in 1992 by the Merchant-Ivory team, starring Vanessa Redgrave, Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins, and Helena Bonham-Carter.

The Rainbow

More in Brangwen Family Series

Women in Love

Books similar to The Rainbow

Sons and Lovers

Of Human Bondage

A Handful of Dust

Women in Love

The End of the Affair

Tender Is the Night

The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

Howards End

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