《虹》是二十世纪*伟大的长篇巨著之一，它代表了劳伦斯作品的*高成就。它既是一部社会批判小说，又是一部心理分析小说。说通过布朗温一家三代人的感情纠葛来表现人们对**自然，和谐家庭关系的追寻。布朗温是这个家族的*代，他娶了一个带着孩子的波兰寡妇，这个孩子就是第二代的代表人物安娜。由于文化背景和个性上的差异，布朗温与妻子的婚姻平凡无奇。长大成人的安娜嫁给了布朗温的侄子威尔成。他们在思想上敢于追求和谐的性和理想的婚姻，由于思想观念和信仰上的分歧，他们虽然维系着完整的婚姻，但在精神上是空虚的。与父母不同，第三代人乌尔苏拉敢于在行动上追求和谐、**的两性关系，她与青年军官虽然经历着青春的热恋，但因缺乏精神上的和谐而勇敢地放弃了婚姻。
该书自出版以来，被译成世界上多种文字，还被多次改编成电影。无论作为语言学习的课本，还是作为文学读本，本书对当代中国的青年都将产生积极的影响。为了使读者能够了解英文故事概况，进而提高阅读速度和阅读水平，在每章的开始部分增加了中文导读。

第三章 安娜·兰斯珂的童年时代
Chapter 3 Childhood of Anna Lensky
莉迪亚生了一个儿子，汤姆心里很满足，他的妻子终于成为了他孩子的母亲。儿子出生之后，莉迪亚似乎成了一个真正的英国人，可原先的活力却少了很多。在汤姆眼里，莉迪亚还是那么漂亮，充满热情的眼神使整个人焕发出光彩。莉迪亚喜欢这个婴儿，当汤姆看到她专注地给儿子喂奶时，会努力克制住自己想接近莉迪亚的冲动。莉迪亚再次接近他了，两个人又恢复了初恋时的美好感觉，只是那种兴奋消失得太快。汤姆不得不学会控制住自己，因为莉迪亚无法让他满足，他甚至开始嫉妒被她抱在怀里的孩子。汤姆希望能把自己所有的爱都倾注在莉迪亚身上，不过现在这已经不可能了，安娜成为了他的另一个爱的**。
小弟弟出生后，安娜不再为母亲担心了。她由*初的迷惑到愤怒，*后找到了平衡。母亲原本对安娜的责任感已经转移到她的弟弟身上，安娜获得了自由。这以后，安娜真正喜欢上了汤姆，他们经常在一起学习、唱歌。他们称婴儿是“黑鸟”，两个人都开着婴儿的玩笑。安娜不喜欢和别的孩子在一起，总是一个人玩耍，经常惹得农场的帮工哈哈大笑。她喜欢和父亲一起坐马车出门，高高在上的她经常引起行人的注目。安娜经常会扯着嗓门和行人打招呼，她的行为把大家都逗乐了。当父亲在酒馆喝酒时，她会静静地坐在一边，孤傲的她会简单地回答一些大人的提问，不过整个人流露出一种“别碰我”的模样，这让大人们也不太敢继续纠缠她问一些废话。汤姆不忍心把安娜一个人留在旅馆，只好带着她一起去牛市场。脏兮兮的牛市场让安娜有些畏缩，她被父亲留在了点心摊上，一个人孤零零
安娜找到了快乐
地坐在那里。孤独的她等了很久，父亲还是没有回来，但她忍住了，并没有哭泣。父亲卖出了牲口，又带着她去办理其他一些事情。安娜总会听到周围人询问她的来历，意识到自己总是和母亲连在一起。**的旅程让安娜看到了很多新鲜事情，她后来成了牛市场的常客。她和父亲的一些朋友很熟悉，刚开始会瞧��起这些乡下人，但那些乡下人善良而淳朴。
汤姆很想把安娜培养成一个有教养的小姐。*近他的哥哥艾尔弗雷德和一个女人私通，经常抛弃孩子和家庭，跑到那个女人家里去。汤姆一次在车站碰到了前去和情妇约会的哥哥，他决定自己亲自去拜访一下那个女人，而他也在这次拜访中知道了很多曾经不了解的事情。他得知艾尔弗雷德很喜欢看书，经常和那个女人一起读书，他还见到了那个女人的父亲，心里很是崇拜。回到家后，他对自己乡巴佬的生活有些厌恶，开始想进入**社会。他*次后悔继承了农场，虽然生活很宽裕，也有一个有教养的妻子，却根本不可能过上**社会的生活。后来，那次拜访的心情逐渐退却，他又恢复了平静，一想到哥哥的那个情妇，总觉得那女人缺少一种人性的温暖。
晚上，他有时和妻子单独在一起，有时和安娜一起玩耍。妻子总是静静地坐在一旁，一言不语，低着头做针线活。那种沉闷让人窒息，汤姆忍不住走了出去。莉迪亚拦住了他，质问他是不是不想和自己在一起，这说中了汤姆内心的秘密。妻子不停地追问他的想法，*后认为他想要找像他哥哥的情妇一样的女人，这让汤姆很吃惊。他被妻子说中了心中的想法，妻子的质问让他怒火直升。这一段对话让两个人都陷入了沉默，很长时间之后，莉迪亚主动呼唤着丈夫，汤姆走到了她身边，两个人紧紧地抱在了一起。起初，汤姆还有些拒绝，不过欲火很快使他沸腾，他想拥有她，一种神秘的力量驱使着两个人再次结合在一起，这是结婚后两个人再次融为一体。他们体会到****的美妙，也发现了另一种新的生活方式。他们终于打破了长时间以来的隔阂，彼此终于了解了对方，开始了真正的家庭生活。安娜可以无忧无虑了，她可以自由自在地在父母亲的关爱和照顾下玩耍成长了。
om Brangwen never loved his own son as he loved his stepchild Anna. When they told him it was a boy, he had a thrill of pleasure. He liked the confirmation of fatherhood. It gave him satisfaction to know he had a son. But he felt not very much outgoing to the baby itself. He was its father, that was enough.
He was glad that his wife was mother of his child. She was serene, a little bit shadowy, as if she were transplanted. In the birth of the child she seemed to lose connection with her former self. She became now really English, really Mrs. Brangwen. Her vitality, however, seemed lowered.
She was still, to Brangwen, immeasurably beautiful. She was still passionate, with a flame of being. But the flame was not robust and present. Her eyes shone, her face glowed for him, but like some flower opened in the shade, that could not bear the full light. She loved the baby. But even this, with a sort of dimness, a faint absence about her, a shadowiness even in her mother–love. When Brangwen saw her nursing his child, happy, absorbed in it, a pain went over him like a thin flame. For he perceived how he must subdue himself in his approach to her. And he wanted again the robust, moral exchange of love and passion such as he had had at first with her, at one time and another, when they were matched at their highest intensity. This was the one experience for him now. And he wanted it, always, with remorseless craving.
She came to him again, with the same lifting of her mouth as had driven him almost mad with trammelled passion at first. She came to him again, and, his heart delirious in delight and readiness, he took her. And it was almost as before.
Perhaps it was quite as before. At any rate, it made him know perfection, it established in him a constant eternal knowledge.
But it died down before he wanted it to die down. She was finished, she could take no more. And he was not exhausted, he wanted to go on. But it could not be.
So he had to begin the bitter lesson, to abate himself, to take less than he wanted. For she was Woman to him, all other women were her shadows. For she had satisfied him. And he wanted it to go on. And it could not. However he raged, and, filled with suppression that became hot and bitter, hated her in his soul that she did not want him, however he had mad outbursts, and drank and made ugly scenes, still he knew, he was only kicking against the pricks. It was not, he had to learn, that she would not want him enough, as much as he demanded that she should want him. It was that she could not. She could only want him in her own way, and to her own measure. And she had spent much life before he found her as she was, the woman who could take him and give him fulfilment. She had taken him and given him fulfilment. She still could do so, in her own times and ways. But he must control himself, measure himself to her.
He wanted to give her all his love, all his passion, all his essential energy. But it could not be. He must find other things than her, other centres of living. She sat close and impregnable with the child. And he was jealous of the child.
But he loved her, and time came to give some sort of course to his troublesome current of life, so that it did not foam and flood and make misery. He formed another centre of love in her child, Anna. Gradually a part of his stream of life was diverted to the child, relieving the main flood to his wife. Also he sought the company of men, he drank heavily now and again.
The child ceased to have so much anxiety for her mother after the baby came. Seeing the mother with the baby boy, delighted and serene and secure, Anna was at first puzzled, then gradually she became indignant, and at last her little life settled on its own swivel, she was no more strained and distorted to support her mother. She became more childish, not so abnormal, not charged with cares she could not understand. The charge of the mother, the satisfying of the mother, had devolved elsewhere than on her. Gradually the child was freed. She became an independent, forgetful little soul, loving from her own centre.
Of her own choice, she then loved Brangwen most, or most obviously. For these two made a little life together, they had a joint activity. It amused him, at evening, to teach her to count, or to say her letters. He remembered for her all the little nursery rhymes and childish songs that lay forgotten at the bottom of his brain.
At first she thought them rubbish. But he laughed, and she laughed. They became to her a huge joke. Old King Cole she thought was Brangwen. Mother Hubbard was Tilly, her mother was the old woman who lived in a shoe. It was a huge, it was a frantic delight to the child, this nonsense, after her years with her mother, after the poignant folk–tales she had had from her mother, which always troubled and mystified her soul.
She shared a sort of recklessness with her father, a complete, chosen carelessness that had the laugh of ridicule in it. He loved to make her voice go high and shouting and defiant with laughter. The baby was dark-skinned and dark-haired, like the mother, and had hazel eyes. Brangwen called him the blackbird.
“Hallo,” Brangwen would cry, starting as he heard the wail of the child announcing it wanted to be taken out of the cradle, “there’s the blackbird tuning up.”
“The blackbird’s singing,” Anna would shout with delight, “the blackbird’s singing.”
“When the pie was opened,” Brangwen shouted in his bawling bass voice, going over to the cradle, “the bird began to sing.”
“Wasn’t it a dainty dish to set before a king?” cried Anna, her eyes flashing with joy as she uttered the cryptic words, looking at Brangwen for confirmation. He sat down with the baby, saying loudly:
“Sing up, my lad, sing up.”
And the baby cried loudly, and Anna shouted lustily, dancing in wild bliss:
“Sing a song of sixpence Pocketful of posies, Ascha! Ascha!—”
Then she stopped suddenly in silence and looked at Brangwen again, her eyes flashing, as she shouted loudly and delightedly:
“I’ve got it wrong, I’ve got it wrong.”
“Oh, my sirs,” said Tilly entering, “what a racket!”
Brangwen hushed the child and Anna flipped and danced on. She loved her wild bursts of rowdiness with her father. Tilly hated it, Mrs. Brangwen did not mind.
Anna did not care much for other children. She domineered them, she treated them as if they were extremely young and incapable, to her they were little people, they were not her equals. So she was mostly alone, flying round the farm, entertaining the farm-hands and Tilly and the servant-girl, whirring on and never ceasing.
She loved driving with Brangwen in the trap. Then, sitting high up and bowling along, her passion for eminence and dominance was satisfied. She was like a little savage in her arrogance. She thought her father important, she was installed beside him on high. And they spanked along, beside the high, flourishing hedge—tops, surveying the activity of the countryside. When people shouted a greeting to him from the road below, and Brangwen shouted jovially back, her little voice was soon heard shrilling along with his, followed by her chuckling laugh, when she looked up at her father with bright eyes, and they laughed at each other. And soon it was the custom for the passerby to sing out: “How are ter, Tom? Well, my lady!” or else, “Mornin’, Tom, mornin’, my Lass!” or else, “You’re off together then?” or else, “You’re lookin’ rarely, you two.”
Anna would respond, with her father: “How are you, John! Good mornin’, William! Ay, makin’ for Derby,” shrilling as loudly as she could. Though often, in response to “You’re off out a bit then,” she would reply, “Yes, we are,” to the great joy of all. She did not like the people who saluted him and did not salute her.
……

*章 汤姆·布朗温和波兰女人的婚姻/
Chapter 1 How Tom Brangwen Married a Polish Lady 1
第二章 在马石农庄的生活/Chapter 2 They Live at the Marsh 48
第三章 安娜·兰斯珂的童年时代/
Chapter 3 Childhood of Anna Lensky 82
第四章 安娜·布朗温的少女时代/
Chapter 4 Girlhood of Anna Brangwen 101
第五章 在马石农庄举行的婚礼/
Chapter 5 Wedding at the Marsh 139
第六章 安娜是胜利者/Chapter 6 Anna Victrix 152
第七章 教堂/Chapter 7 The Cathedral 210
第八章 孩子/Chapter 8 The Child 225
第九章 马石农庄和洪水/Chapter 9 The Marsh and the Flood 257
第十章 扩展的圈子/Chapter 10 The Widening Circle 280
第十一章 *次恋爱/Chapter 11 First Love 303
第十二章 耻辱/Chapter 12 Shame 358
第十三章 男人们的世界/Chapter 13 The Man’s World 380
第十四章 圈子更大了/Chapter 14 The Widening Circle 444
第十五章 欢乐中的痛苦/Chapter 15 The Bitterness of Ecstasy 461
第十六章 虹/Chapter 16 The Rainbow 521

本书是英汉双语版名著系列丛书中的一种，编写本系列丛书的另一个主要目的就是为准备参加英语**留学考试的学生提供学习素材。对于留学考试，无论是SSAT、SAT还是TOEFL、GRE，要取得好的成绩，就必须了解西方的社会、历史、文化、生活等方面的背景知识，而阅读西方原版名著是了解这些知识*重要的手段之一。