Thirteen essays that aim to illuminate the achievement of one of England's greatest modern writers. Employing a variety of perspectives - historical, cultural, theoretical, feminist - the critics here assembled address concerns about Lawrence's work that have emerged in recent years: his attitudes toward the working class, art, women, Britain; his conceptions of male-female relationships, sexuality, education and knowledge; and his place in cultural history and the traditions of the English novel. All of the essays - from reassessments of Lawrence's position in the English literary tradition to analyses of his influence on recent American poetry - find renewed faith in the challenge of Lawrence's work, making this volume of interest to Lawrence scholars and students.

Pronounced obscene when it was first published in 1915, The Rainbow is the epic story of three generations of the Brangwens, a Midlands family. A visionary novel, considered to be one of Lawrence’s finest, it explores the complex sexual and psychological relationships between men and women in an increasingly industrialized world. “Lives are separate, but life is continuous—it continues in the fresh start by the separate life in each generation,” wrote F. R. Leavis. “No work, I think, has presented this perception as an imaginatively realized truth more compellingly than The Rainbow.”