D. H. Lawrence started 'The Sisters' in March 1913, wrote four different versions and claimed to have discarded 'quite a thousand pages' before completing The Rainbow in May 1915. The novel was suppressed, just over a month after publication, in November 1915. Mark Kinkead-Weekes gives the composition history and collates the surviving states of the text to assess the damage done to Lawrence's great novel, and to provide a text as close to that which the author wrote as is now possible. The final manuscript, revisions in the typescript and the first edition are recorded in the full textual apparatus so the reader can follow the development of the novel and evaluate what outside interference might have done to it. Appendixes give the earliest, unpublished fragments from the first two versions and a newly discovered report and summary of the third. Published in two volumes.