"The Rainbow" is a novel by D.H. Lawrence. It chronicles the lives of three generations of the Brangwen family in Nottinghamshire.
The period spans the transition from rural to urban culture.
After the death of his father, Tom Brangwen inherits Marsh Farm in the Erewash Valley and marries a Polish widow, Lydia, who already has a daughter, Anna, by her first marriage. Tom becomes devoted to Anna but estranged from his wife, even after the birth of two sons, Tom and Fred. Anna marries Will Brangwen, Tom's nephew, like his father, Alfred, also a gifted craftsman.
They move into a cottage nearby, leased them by Tom, where they spend a rapturous and
passionate honeymoon. However, over the succeeding years Anna grows apart from her husband and devotes herself to her six children. The oldest of these, Ursula, becomes strongly attached to her father, and overshadows her more reserved sister, Gudrun.
The novel's focus shifts towards Ursula, following her development through adolescence and early womanhood. Her grandfather is drowned when she is eight years old and she grows close to her Polish grandmother, Lydia, whose foreign origins intrigue her. Later, as a young woman, she meets and is fascinated by Anton Skrebensky, a Polish connection of Lydia's. Ursula begin a passionate
relationship with Anton, but being an army engineer, Anton departs for the Boer War leaving her sexually disillusioned and frustrated. She enters into a brief lesbian relationship with her class mistress, Winifred Inger, who subsequently becomes the wife of her uncle, Tom Brangwen.
For two years, Ursula matriculates and struggles as a schoolteacher in Ilkeston. The Brangwen family moves to Beldover and Ursula studies for a BA degree. Anton returns during her final year in college and they renew their passionate relationship which destroyed her concentration on her studies. As a result, Ursula fails her degree, but Anton, now an officer, begs her to marry him and live in India. She declines at first, but changes her mind when she later believes she is pregnant. It was too late, as Ursula find out that Anton is now married to his colonel's daughter.
Ursula falls deliriously ill, and experiences a symbolic charge of horses while out walking. She appears to suffer a miscarriage, but recovers to contemplate through her window a rainbow, the sign of tomorrow's hope: "the earth's new architecture" symbolically sweeping away "the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories."
In "Women in Love," the sequel novel to "The Rainbow," Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen reappear.