In The Rainbow and its sequel, Women in Love, Lawrence created two modern heroines who refused to have their lives defined by their class and their sex. They were defiant. They were artistic. They were not ashamed to have sexual feelings, just as men did. Although neither novel is even remotely pornographic in the current sense of the word, they were censored, banned and pilloried when they were first published - attacked by men who feared that such ideas could lead anywhere, could lead even to women demanding the vote. At the time, Lawrence's The Rainbow was as controversial as his Lady Chatterley's Lover.
Ken Russell, the iconoclastic English director of such wildly different films as "Tommy," "The Boyfriend" and "Lair Of The White Worm," first made his feature-length reputation with the brilliant "Women in Love," released in 1969. Twenty years later, he is back with a film version of the first novel. The two films are linked by Glenda Jackson, who now plays the mother of the character she played in 1969.
The movie takes place in rural England around the time of the World War I, and centers on the story of Ursula Brangwen (Sammi Davis), daughter of an old, established and respectable farming family, who has no desire to march in step with the requirements of her family tradition. She is restless and inquisitive, and in Winifred, the local schoolteacher (Amanda Donohoe), she finds an older woman to model herself after.
Winifred is well-read, independent of mind, healthy of body.
She is not married, and has become a schoolteacher because teaching and the stage were then two of the few professions in which a single woman could support herself. Her independence makes her a daily offense to the master of the school, one of those coarse male sadists Lawrence could draw so well. But to her students, she is a breath of freedom.
It is from Winifred that Ursula first learns that a woman's life need not be rigidly bound by social convention. They go for walks together and read books together, and Ursula falls in love with the older woman - not into sexual love, although that seems like a possibility, but into idealistic love. This woman becomes a symbol of Ursula's own quest.
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