In 1915 D. H. Lawrence, with _The Rainbow_, hit the first ringing blow upon the anvil of controversy. As the messiah of robust heterosexual passion, Lawrence needs no introduction, and in this early novel he attacked right and left all factors which militate against it in modern society—unhealthy urban and industrial life, sterile intellectuality (especially among women), and lesbianism. It is in the final portion of his three-generation panorama that the current representative of the Brangwyn clan, sixteen-year-old Ursula, contracts a passion for a schoolmistress. She has just had a brief but complete heterosexual experience, and Lawrence implies that the tide of emotion which overflows toward Winifred Inger is little more than an aftermath of that physical awakening. A ten-page chapter significantly entitled “Shame” gives the history of their affair, which reaches its first climax at Winifred’s river cottage when the two bathe nude at night. Immediately after this episode the girl’s one desire is to get away. Over a period of months, however, “the two women became intimate. Their lives seemed suddenly to fuse into one.” During the long vacation, Ursula, as always when away from the older woman, is desolate and afire for her, but with their reunion a heavy clogged sense of deadness began to gather upon her, from the other woman’s contact. Her female hips seemed big and earthy, her ankles and her arms too thick.[27] [The last touch is a highly original bit of anthropometry.] Winifred, deeply in love with the younger girl, wishes to leave the school and live with Ursula in London where they can mingle in literary circles and participate in the Women’s Movement. Ursula repudiates the suggestion and goes on to other heterosexual adventures, but—possibly as a result of her lesbian experience?—she is always too much concerned with her own emotions to become a satisfactory partner for men. Her leaving a lover and going out to steep herself in the light of a full moon is offered as symbolic of her narcissistic self-absorption. This novel was published by the solid firm of Methuen, but was withdrawn after a police court verdict of indecency which was based on attacks by three or four reviewers. The charge was general, only one (Robert Lynd) making an oblique allusion to its lesbian aspect. Lawrence was not notified directly of the court order, and since he had neither funds nor influence to launch a legal protest,[28] this act of censorship raised few echoes in comparison with some cases to be noted later. It did, however, postpone general circulation of the novel, and undoubtedly focussed some attention on lesbianism.