The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence - 1915

First edition. A bit dusty, covers a bit over opened, all in all Very Good. One of the most infamous works of the early 20th century. Numerically rare(some roughly 1300 copies surviving purposeful destruction), but always available – this copy however has a distinguished provenance. It contains the signatures of Barbara Low (close friend and confidant of Lawrence) and Catherine Carswell (Scottish author, biographer and journalist who was also a close friend of Lawrence. She lost her job after a positive review of The Rainbow). Ex-libris, Sir Charles Philip Huntington, 3rd Baronet.

'Upon publication of The Rainbow in 1915, D. H. Lawrence and his publisher, Algernon Methuen, were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857. During the trial, the Crown prosecutor, Herbert Muskett, condemned Lawrence's text for what he referred to as its "immoral representations of sexuality." Methuen, fearing that his business would suffer from the bad publicity, made a formal apology and surrendered all remaining copies to the magistrate. As a result, Lawrence's novel was not banned, but Herbert Muskett was able to lash out against the author's depictions of "sexual perversion." Muskett's moralizing speech focused on the chapter "Shame," stating that it is "a mass of obscenity of thought, idea and action throughout, wrapped up in language that would be regarded in some quarters as an artistic and intellectual effort."What is significant is the fact that although The Rainbow includes numerous descriptions of explicit sexual acts, only the "Shame" chapter seemed to provoke and upset the court. We must therefore assume that the Crown prosecutor conflated "immoral representations of sexuality" with representations of lesbianism, for it is the "Shame" chapter that describes Ursula's affair with Winifred Inger.

The trial of The Rainbow is an important moment in British literary and legal history in that it represents the first public forum in which lesbianism was discussed as a moral (and legal) issue. Thus, by identifying "Shame" as the central morally offensive section of Lawrence's novel, Herbert Muskett (and, by extension, the British legal system) was participating in a cultural shift whereby women's sexuality was becoming recognized as independent of male sexuality—a cultural shift that Lawrence attempted to capture in his novel and to which he, in the end, contributed. One could argue, then, that in The Rainbow Lawrence responds to the anxieties generated by the newfound articulation of women's sexuality, anxieties that led to the policing of women's sexual desire, as well as an increase in homophobic discourses regarding sexual relationships between women.' (Edwards, Copenhagen)

"In The Rainbow you can see the straightforward Edwardian novel readying itself for Modernism in its language and psychological approach (it was published seven years before James Joyce's Ulysses and 10 before Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway). "

(McAloon)

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