The Rainbow

About D. H. Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence was born 11 September 1885 in Eastwood Nottinghamshire. His father was a miner and his mother was a schoolteacher. In 1906 he took up a scholarship at Nottingham University to study to be a teacher. His first novel The White Peacock was published in 1911. Lawrence gave up teaching in 1911 due to illness. In 1912 he met and fell in love with a married woman Frieda Weekley and they eloped to Germany together. They were married in 1914 and spent the rest of their lives together travelling around the world. In 1915 Lawrence published The Rainbow which was banned in Great Britain for obscenity. Women in Love continues the story of the Brangwen family begun in The Rainbow and was finished by Lawrence in 1916 but not published until 1920. Another of Lawrence's most famous works Lady Chatterley's Lover was privately printed in Florence in 1928 but was not published in Britain until 1960 when it was the subject of an unsuccessful court case brought against it for obscenity. As well as novels Lawrence also wrote in a variety of other genres and his poetry criticism and travel books remain highly regarded. He was also a keen painter. D.H. Lawrence died in France on 2 March 1930. Rachel Cusk was born in Canada in 1967 and moved to the United Kingdom in 1974. She is the author of nine novels and three works of non-fiction. She has won and been shortlisted for numerous prizes: Outline (2014) was shortlisted for the Folio Prize the Goldsmiths Prize the Baileys Prize the Giller Prize and the Canadian Governor General's Award. It was also picked by the New York Times as one of the top ten books of the year. Its follow-up Transit (2016) was chosen as a book of the year by the Observer New Statesman Guardian and Spectator. In 2003 Rachel Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'. In 2015 her version of Euripides Medea was put on at the Almeida Theatre with Rupert Goold directing and was shortlisted for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.