From The Sisters to The Rainbow: Marketing of Romance in Wartime England

Drawing on new research on British publishing practices by Susan Jones, Janice Harris, Joyce Wexler, and other scholars of British modernism, this study analyzes Methuen’s marketing strategy for D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow. Comparing the advertising that Methuen developed for Joseph Conrad’s Chance and Arnold Bennett’s Hilda Lessways with Lawrence’s The Rainbow, this study shows how the final changes Lawrence made to the novel in 1914–15 show his effort to distinguish his novel from Conrad’s revision of the New Woman novel in Chance and Bennett’s revision of the “modern girl” novel in Hilda Lessways. It demonstrates, instead, how Ursula’s responses challenged wartime notions of “home,” gender roles, family, and marriage. Re-examining the references to history and myth, especially in the third generation of the Brangwens, this study illustrates why The Rainbow ignited such controversy by presenting a family saga that challenged marriage as the standard closure in popular romances and exposed radical alternatives to marriage that New Women and contemporary suffragettes strategically elected to ignore. It concludes by showing how Methuen’s plan to sell Lawrence’s novel as a popular romance contributed to its subsequent banning in England in 1915.