(He was, possibly, the first “mainstream” English writer to do this thus all the furor.) His heroine in The Rainbow, Ursula Brangwen, sees her boyfriend (to whom she is engaged but doesn’t marry) naked while he is bathing, sleeps with him in his hotel room while pretending to be his wife, and has outdoor sex with him. Lawrence only suggests that his characters engage in sexual activity. The Rainbow seems very mild by today’s standards. All the rules, all the taboos, seem to have been lifted, and nothing is sacred anymore. We live in a permissive age where any words might be spoken for public consumption anything might be seen on TV or in movies or written about in magazines, newspapers and books. Readers nowadays will not understand what all the fuss was about when The Rainbow was first published nearly a hundred years ago. It wasn’t available in England and the United States for many years after its publication, except in an “expurgated” version, meaning that somebody went through the book and took out the parts they considered “offensive.” The book was banned in many quarters while the righteous of the day took great pleasure in making a public display of burning it. Lawrence’s novel, The Rainbow, was first published in 1915, it was hailed as obscene and Lawrence himself was labeled a pornographer.
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