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both inside and outside their marriage.The author Michael Squires has had privileged access to hundreds of Frieda's unpublished letters, and draws on them to portray a powerful but a typical marriage, in which disappointment and infidelity damaged but also strengthened the Lawrences'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.