Volume 42, Number 14 · September 21, 1995
The Constant Wife
By Diane Johnson
D.H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage
by Brenda Maddox
Simon and Schuster, 620 pp., $30.00
A Genius for Living: The Life of Frieda Lawrence
by Janet Byrne
HarperCollins, 504 pp., $27.50
Frieda Lawrence, Including 'Not I, But the Wind' and other autobiographical writings
by Rosie Jackson
Pandora/HarperCollins, 240 pp., $22.00
Arguing to install Lawrence in the pantheon of great English writers, F.R. Leavis took the usual view that 'when we are taking stock of the disadvantages Lawrence had to contend with…we have to consider Frieda herself,' illustrating a law of literary history that admired writers will usually be thought to have had unworthy, if not downright disastrous, mates—think of T.S. Eliot, or John Stuart Mill, or Dickens (who agreed about his), or Sylvia Plath, or Carlyle, or Byron, or Socrates (we await a closer inspection of the Brownings). Rosie Jackson quotes Lawrence biographer Keith Sagar's representative view that Frieda Lawrence was 'amoral, disorderly, wasteful, utterly helpless around the house, lying in bed late, lounging about all day with a cigarette dangling from her mouth.' That is, she was a terrible housekeeper, lazy, and a smoker, besides being his inferior, promiscuous, and—charges repeated with peculiar malice—an unnatural mother, German, and fat.
Review, 3129 words
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