The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence
Published 1915 · 335 pages · 158,982 words · about 12 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Modernist & Experimental Fiction
How hard is The Rainbow to read?
The Rainbow scores 62 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 65 out of 100
- Lawrence draws on a rich but largely non-specialist vocabulary, favoring abstract emotional and sensory terms like 'inchoate,' 'somnambulant,' 'fecund,' and 'consummation.' The diction is elevated and literary but rarely arcane; the challenge lies in the sheer volume of precise psychological and bodily language rather than obscure or technical words.
- Sentence structure: 78 out of 100
- Sentences frequently spiral outward through semicolons, dashes, and nested subordinate clauses, sometimes running for ten or more lines in a single rhythmic surge. Lawrence favors cumulative, paratactic structures that pile phrase upon phrase, creating a prose rhythm closer to incantation than conventional narration. The reader must hold multiple threads of feeling and argument in suspension across long, breath-like periods.
- Abstraction: 80 out of 100
- The novel constantly moves from concrete rural life into dense philosophical exploration of consciousness, desire, and selfhood. Characters' inner lives are rendered in highly abstract language about 'the unknown,' 'the beyond,' and 'the infinite,' and long passages explore the metaphysics of marriage, gender, and spiritual becoming with minimal concrete anchoring.
- Information density: 72 out of 100
- Each paragraph layers physical description, psychological probing, and symbolic resonance simultaneously, demanding that the reader process multiple registers at once. The density is emotional and symbolic rather than encyclopedic; Lawrence does not pack in facts or references but saturates every scene with felt meaning that rewards slow, attentive reading.
- Narrative indirection: 66 out of 100
- While the plot follows a roughly chronological generational arc, Lawrence frequently submerges conventional narrative momentum beneath long passages of interior psychic exploration. Key events like courtships, marriages, and crises are rendered less as dramatic scenes than as tidal movements of feeling, requiring the reader to extract story from waves of emotion and abstraction.
- Symbolic density: 85 out of 100
- Symbolism pervades the novel at every level. The rainbow itself is a governing symbol of transcendence and covenant; the Marsh Farm, the cathedral, the moon, horses, water, and darkness all carry sustained symbolic weight. Natural imagery consistently doubles as spiritual allegory, and the reader must track these layered meanings to access the novel's full significance.
- Ironic distance: 25 out of 100
- Lawrence writes with intense earnestness and deep empathetic immersion in his characters' inner lives. There is virtually no satirical detachment, comic undercutting, or narrative irony. The authorial voice takes the characters' spiritual struggles and erotic experiences with full seriousness, occasionally bordering on prophetic solemnity.
- Resolution withholding: 68 out of 100
- Each generation's story arrives at provisional resolutions through marriage or revelation, but these are consistently shown to be incomplete or unstable. The novel ends with Ursula's vision of the rainbow, which offers hope rather than closure, and the generational structure inherently emphasizes continuation over finality. The sequel, Women in Love, further underscores this openness.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- The novel proceeds chronologically across three generations of the Brangwen family with a consistent omniscient third-person narrator. The structure is essentially linear, with the focus shifting from Tom to Anna to Ursula in broad succession. There are no formal experiments, temporal disruptions, or competing narrative frames; complexity resides in the prose rather than the architecture.
How The Rainbow is regarded
The Rainbow holds a literary regard score of 81 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.