The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence follows three generations of the Brangwen family, focusing on the sexual dynamics of, and relations between, the characters. Lawrence's frank treatment of sexual desire and the power plays within relationships as a natural and even spiritual force of life caused The Rainbow to be prosecuted in an obscenity trial in late 1915, as a result of which all copies were seized and burnt. After this ban it was unavailable in Britain for 11 years. Women in Love is a sequel to The Rainbow. Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen are two sisters living in the Midlands of England in the 1910s. Ursula is a teacher, Gudrun an artist. They meet two men who live nearby, Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich. The four become friends. Ursula and Birkin become involved and Gudrun eventually begins a love affair with Gerald. All four are deeply concerned with questions of society, politics, and the relationship between men and women. Birkin asks Ursula to marry him, and she agrees. Gerald and Gudrun's relationship, however, becomes stormy.

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 Rainbow is a novel by British author D. H. Lawrence, first published in 1915. It follows three generations of the Brangwen family living in Nottinghamshire, [2] particularly focusing on the individual's struggle to growth and fulfilment within the confining strictures of English social life. Lawrence's 1920 novel Women in Love is a sequel to The Rainbow

Take a mining townlet like Woodhouse, with a population of ten thousand people, and three generations behind it. This space of three generations argues a certain well-established society. The old "County" has fled from the sight of so much disembowelled coal, to flourish on mineral rights in regions still idyllic. Remains one great and inaccessible magnate, the local coal owner: three generations old, and clambering on the bottom step of the "County," kicking off the mass below. Rule him out. A well established society in Woodhouse, full of fine shades, ranging from the dark of coal-dust to grit of stone-mason and sawdust of timber-merchant, through the lustre of lard and butter and meat, to the perfume of the chemist and the disinfectant of the doctor, on to the serene gold-tarnish of bank-managers, cashiers for the firm, clergymen and such-like, as far as the automobile refulgence of the general-manager of all the collieries.

Focusing on D. H. Lawrence's concept of «essential criticism», which was introduced in his posthumously published «Study of Thomas Hardy» and his statement that «every work of art adheres to some system of morality. But it must contain the essential criticism on the morality to which it adheres», this book examines the ways in which Lawrence presents his ideas in his major novels The Rainbow and Women in Love. It explores how this concept plays a crucial role in his fiction as an «other» to the implied author's messages: functioning differently, as equivocation and creative strife, respectively, in The Rainbow and Women in Love, the concept helps to make these novels more dynamic that commonly realized.