D.H. Lawrence and Frieda
A Portrait of Love and Loyalty
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
This book challenges the reader to see the Lawrences in a new light. In 1912, D. H. Lawrence met Frieda von Richthofen, the wife of his former professor, and fell in love with her. The pair eloped to Bavaria - leaving her three children behind - and two years later they were married. D. H. Lawrence and Frieda follows the fates of these two strong people as they overcame one obstacle after another to their commitment. As their love matured, their loyalty to each other was tested time and again from both inside and outside their marriage.The author Michael Squires has had privileged access to hundreds of Frieda's unpublished letters, and draws on them to portray a powerful but a typical marriage, in which disappointment and infidelity damaged but also strengthened the Lawrences' marital bond. Out of these new sources emerges a fresh clarity about the successive stages of their love - from infatuation and intimacy, to love and deepened respect, to a loss of emotional coherence.In elegant chapters remarkable for their brevity and insight, the author rediscovers the essence of the Lawrences' marriage, an essence that continued to inspire Frieda long after Lawrence died. Her forceful character, and Lawrence's understanding of it, triumph here as never before. The time has come for a fresh appraisal of one of the most justly celebrated marriages in modern literary history. This is it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this lively, exhaustive account of their intense marriage, (in)famous author D.H. Lawrence and his uninhibited wife Frieda von Richthofen frolic through a life that was often sparse and "always in motion," set in enchanting villas, borrowed cottages, seaside retreats and great Western ranches across England, Italy, Germany, America and elsewhere. Squires, a long-time Lawrence scholar, draws on previously unpublished letters from Frieda to craft a sensitive portrait of the dissimilar, individualistic and fiercely loyal lovers whose colorful renegade style could easily turn disagreeable (Frieda left her husband and three children to elope with Lawrence) and whose betrayals revealed the crushing insecurity that hid in each-partly revealed in Lady Chatterly's Lover, Lawrence's thinly-veiled account of the marriage. Friends (and hangers-on) were crucial to the couple, who were seldom alone; the book is graced with literary figures and exotic locales, as the couple's search for an earthly paradise (in part to relieve Lawrence's lifelong but unmentionable tuberculosis) takes them to exotic locales like Capri and Taos, New Mexico. Fans of the notorious novelist and early 20th century literature in general will find this account fresh and illuminating.
