The Rainbow tells the story of three generations of the Brangwen family, a dynasty of farmers and craftsmen who live in the east Midlands of England, on the borders of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire.

The last and most extended part of the book, and also probably the most famous, then deals with Will and Anna's daughter, Ursula, and her struggle to find fulfilment for her passionate, spiritual, and sensual nature against the confines of the increasingly materialist and conformist society around her.

She experiences a same-sex relationship with a teacher, and a passionate but ultimately doomed love affair with Anton Skrebensky, a British soldier of Polish ancestry.

Lawrence's frank treatment of sexual desire, and the part it plays within relationships as a natural and even spiritual force of life, caused The Rainbow to be prosecuted in an obscenity trial at Bow Street Magistrates' Court on 13 November 1915, as a result of which 1,011 copies were seized and burnt.

The philosopher Roger Scruton argues in Sexual Desire (1986) that "because we live in a world structured by gender, the other sex is forever to some extent a mystery to us, with a dimension of experience that we can imagine but never inwardly know."