《约克文学作品辅导丛书》介绍

《约克文学作品辅导丛书》（YorkNotes）系Longman集团有

限公司（英国）出版。本丛书覆盖了世界各国历代文学名著，原意

是辅导英国中学生准备文学课的高级会考或供英国大学生自学参

考。因此，它很适合我国高校英语专业学生研读文学作品时参考。

丛书由AN.Jeffares和S.Bushrui两位教授任总编。 每册的

编写者大都是研究有关作家的专家学者，他们又都有在大学讲授

文学的经验，比较了解学生理解上的难点。本丛书自问世以来，始

终畅销不衰，被使用者普遍认为是英美出版的同类书中质量较高

的一种。

丛书每一册都按统一格式对一部作品进行介绍和分析。每一

册都有下列五个部分。

①导言。主要介绍：作者生平，作品产生的社会、历史背景，有

关的文学传统或文艺思潮等。

②内容提要。一般分为两部分：a.全书的内容概述；b.每章的

内容提要及难词、难句注释，如方言、典故、圣经或文学作品的引

语、有关社会文化习俗等。注释恰到好处，对于读懂原作很有帮

助。

③评论。 结合作品的特点，对结构、人物塑造、叙述角度、语言

风格、主题思想等进行分析和评论。 论述深入浅出，分析力求客

观，意在挖掘作品内涵和展示其艺术性。

④学习提示。 提出学习要点、重要引语和思考题（附参考答案

或答案要点）。

⑤进一步研读指导。 介绍该作品的最佳版本；版本中是否有

重大改动；列出供进一步研读的参考书目（包括作者传记、研究有

关作品的专著和评论文章等）。

总之，丛书既提供必要的背景知识，又注意启发学生思考；既

重视在吃透作品的基础上进行分析，又对进一步研究提供具体指

导；因此是一套理想的英语文学辅导材料。

北京师范大学外文系教授 钱二瑗

Part 1: Introduction

A note on the text

Part 2: Summaries

A general summary

Detailed summaries

Part 3: Commentary

The novel as family chronicle

The Bible, the Church and The Rainbow

The Rainbow and education

The style of The Rainbow.

Part 4: Hints for study

Model answers

Part 5: Suggestions for further reading

The author of these notes

Introduction



D. H. LAWRENCE WAS BORN on 11 September 1885 in Eastwood, a small

mining village then about eight miles from Nottingham in the industrial

Midlands of England. He was the third son and the fourth child of a

marriage which had begun with the magnetism of strong physical

passion, but had swiftly deteriorated into a match of incompatibility,

indifference and violence.



Lawrence's father, Arthur, was a coal-miner, a 'butty', who organised

his own 'butty-gang' of miners and negotiated with the mine owners for

their work and pay. A handsome and physically attractive man, full of

animal vitality, he was uncultivated, ill-educated and a direct contrast to

his wife, Lydia. She was intelligent, cultured, and ofa puritanical turn of

mind. The marriage seemed doomed to failure almost from the start.

Mrs Lawrence soon came to loathe the pit dirt, her husband's excessive

drinking and the fellowships in which she had no part; he, in his turn,

disliked her finicking ways and constant air ofsuperiority, and became,

as time went on, more rather than less boorish. Yet her influence in the

family was more powerful than his and one by one the children turned

away from their father.



The birth of the fourth child marked a turning-point in their already

damaged relationship. Writing to Rachel Annand Taylorjust before his

mother's death the novelist described his parents' marriage as 'one

camal, bloody fight' and went on to say,



1 was born hating my father: as early as ever 1 can remember, 1

shivered with horror when he touched me. He was very bad before 1

was born.



The close and stifling relationship with his mother, which coloured the

whole of Lawrence's life until her death, grew out of this early sense of

fear and hatred of his father, instilled in the child from birth.



The mother took a dominant role in her children's upbringing,

encouraging them to despise their father's working-class background

and life in the pits and to aspire to a more genteel, middle-class

livelihood. She was a devout member ofthe Congregational Church and

the children attended chapel three times every Sunday. Lawrence was

brought up on the Bible which he heard read at home, at school and



The CollecledLellersofD. H. Lawrence. edited by HarryT. Moore, Heinemann, London,

1962, p. 69.

in the chapel, and the words ofthe Authorised Version were as familiar

to him as the nursery rhymes and fairy tales of his infancy.



However incompatible the marriage partners, the children of the

marriage were intelligent and successful. The oldest boy, George, solid

and dependable, became an engineer whilst the second brother Ernest

was brilliant, mercurial and seemed set for a dazzling career. It was on

him that William in Sons and Lovers (1913) was moulded and, like

William, Ernest suffered an early and untimely death, all his bright

promise dissipated. The youngest boy, David Herbert, familiarly known

as 'Bertie', became the novelist. Of the two girls in the family, the

younger, Ada, was Lawrence's favourite and in the year following his

death she published, with the assistance of G. Stuart Gelder, a memoir

of his early life.



Lawrence was educated at the local board-school until he was

thirteen; then, in 1898, hewonascholarshiptoNottingham HighSchool

which he attended for the next three years, travelling into Nottingham

every day. It was during his last year at school that he first met Jessie

Chambers, later to be immortalised and, as she thought, cruelly

characterised, as Miriam in Sons andLovers. The Haggs, the Chambers'

farmhouse, became a second home to Lawrence. He loved Jessie's

kindly and undemanding mother and he loved too the fresh, unspoilt

manliness of her father and brothers. The farm was a place to unwind

from the tensions ofhome. With Jessie herselfhe maintained a strange,

involved friendship, part love, part dependence, and Jessie, because she

cared for him, endured agonies through his thoughtlessness, his

cbangeability and his withholding of an essential part ofhimself, some

ultimate communion oflove which he had reserved for his mother alone.

The uncertainties and tortures of his relationship with Jessie are told,

from his own point ofview, in Sons andLovers, thepublicationofwhich

in 1913 finally putanendtoanypossibilityofreconciliationbetweenthe

two.