More on Lawrence

...Lawrence, collecting her many letters, digging up some fugitive newspaper and magazine articles, and providing intelligent notes...

...If it is clear that she often irritated and upset Lawrence when he most needed tranquillity, it is equally clear that he needed her passion and her warmth...

...Her writings do not make her attractive...

...She deserved the kind letter, printed in this volume, from one of the women who had known the young Lawrence and who told Frieda after his death, "You had, without doubt, all the things that he needed...

...during World War I she expresses indifference to the deaths of millions of "dull" young men, so long as "the few that matter" are preserved, and a few months later she is overjoyed by the Russian Revolution...

...He has done his job well, piecing together the fragmentary memoirs left by Mrs...

...Her political and social observations are inconsistent and frequently silly...

...There are other unfortunate gaps, notably the absence of any letters from the years 1919 to 1923 and of any real mention of the unfortunate episode in which the Lawrences were accused of spying for the Germans during World War I. The most serious handicap is that Frieda long ago published her version of her life with Lawrence (Not I But the Wind, 1934), so that the memoirs in this volume deal primarily with the years before she met Lawrence and with her life after his death...

...Reviewed by John M. Muste Tn view of the continuing interest in D. H. Lawrence's life and works, it was inevitable that such a volume as this should eventually find its way into print, and we can be grateful for Professor E. W. Tedlock's editing...

...in the letters written after she had abandoned a husband and three children to elope with Lawrence, she proclaims her own heartbreak but seems hardly aware that her children could have suffered, and she is surprised that her husband harbored some resentment...

...This limitation is especially unfortunate because Frieda von Richtofen Weekley Lawrence Ravagli's claim to fame, as this book makes abundantly clear, was based entirely on her relationship with the writer, the second of her three husbands, and not on any creative talent of her own...

...Her judgments of people—John Mid-dleton Murry, Katharine Mansfield, and Aldous and Maria Huxley—are subject to sudden changes, depending on the fervency with which they acknowledge Lawrence's genius...

...Her writing is inexpressive, and in the memoirs too often dismayingly cute...

...Such talent as she had was for romanticizing her family (a bourgeois branch of an aristocratic Prussian family), for insisting on her own importance in Lawrence's life, for keeping their domestic existence in constant uproar, and for indefatigably proclaiming Lawrence's greatness...

...She complains constantly of her own suffering but is usually callous about the suffering of others...

...Still, she is interesting...

...The editor was handicapped by the fact that Frieda Lawrence, collecting her many let-Dodge Luhan and Dorothy Brett, whom she regarded as rivals for Lawrence's affections, was given to Yale under a restrictive agreement and is for the most part unavailable for publication...

...Nothing in her respectable upbringing or her equally respectable marriage could have prepared her for Lawrence and his ideas, but when they met, she accepted them unhesitatingly in defiance of everything she had been taught to value, and she stayed with Lawrence through nineteen stormy years...

...if her campaign for Lawrence after his death gratified her own ego, she also deserves credit for helping to insure that his genius would not quickly be forgotten...