Frieda von Richthofen

In a dozen guises, but always recognizable, Frieda Lawrence continues to live in D. H. Lawrence's books. "She was not his literary adviser," Robert Lucas tells us here, "but rather the catalyst that set free his latent energies." (During their first months together Lawrence wrote not only the five hundred pages of Sons and Lovers and a number of poems, but also the beginnings of two other important manuscripts and, to relax, a four-act play.) Lucas's engrossing biography of this provocative free spirit will fascinate and surprise those to whom the over-all story is already known, and be a revelation to late-coming Lawrence fans. In either case, it details what is easily one of the great love stories of the twentieth century in all its splendors and miseries. It was 1912 when D. H. Lawrence met the German-born wife of an English professor and took her away from her husband and three children to remain with him, always his model and his inspiration, until his death in 1930. Revelatory in its treatment of Frieda's German years (she remained a voluble fan of her famous "enemy" cousin, the Red Baron, through the First World War) and of the twenty-seven years she survived Lawrence, this book has the effect of pulling together all the bits and pieces of all the memoirs of the last forty years. Ranging from Australia, Mexico, and the United States to Italy and France, and embodying a cast of glittering contemporaries - Katherine Mansfield, Wells, Shaw, the Huxleys, Bertrand Russell - Frieda Lawrence, translated from the German with notable clarity by Geoffrey Skelton, is at once an important contribution to the literature on Lawrence and a turbulent and poignant study of the couple who surely exemplified Lawrence's faith in the truth of "what our blood feels and believes." -- from dust cover.