The Rainbow (Centaur Classics) [The 100 greatest novels of all time - #77]

"The greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." —E. M. Forster
"[Lawrence] was a language, a setting, a world entirely of his own… He was, like all true poetry, against tepid living and tepid loves… [giving] full expression to the gestures of passion." —Anaïs Nin
"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 work, I think, has presented this perception as an imaginatively realized truth more compellingly than 'The Rainbow'." —F. R. Leavis

Lush with religious and metaphysical imagery, this is the story of three generations of the Brangwen family, set against the decline of their rural English existence in the face of industrialization. The novel also treats the most taboo subject of its time, peering intimately into a family’s sexual mores, exposing the dynamics of marriage and physical love as a sexual tug-of-war that is both formidable and inescapable. Visionary and prophetic, The Rainbow was banned in England after its publication in 1915 and was long available in the U.S. only in an expurgated edition.