Frieda Lawrence was a German literary figure mainly known for her marriage to the British novelist D.H. Lawrence.
Life
Emma Maria Frieda Johanna Freiinvon Richthofen was born in Metz. Her father was Baron Friedrich Ernst Emil Ludwig von Richthofen, an engineer in the German army, and her mother was Anna Elise Lydia Marquier. In 1899, she married a British philologist and professor of modern languages, Ernest Weekley, with whom she had three children, Charles Montague, Elsa Agnès and Barbara Joy. They settled in Nottingham, where Ernest was an academic at the university. During her marriage to Weekley she began to translate German literature, mainly fairy tales, into English. She met D.H. Lawrence, a former student of her husband, in 1912; soon she fell in love with him, and they eloped to Germany. During their stay Lawrence was arrested for spying; after the intervention of Frieda's father, the couple walked south over the Alps to Italy. Following her divorce, Frieda and Lawrence married in 1914. She had been legally obliged to leave her children with Weekley; divorced adulterous women were unable to gain custody. While they had intended to return to the continent, the outbreak of war kept them in England, where they endured official harassment and censorship. They also struggled with limited resources and D.H. Lawrence's already frail health. Leaving postwar England at the earliest opportunity, they traveled widely, eventually settling at the Kiowa Ranch near Taos, New Mexico, and in Lawrence's last years at the Villa Mirenda, near Scandicci in Tuscany. After her husband's death in Vence, France, in 1930, she returned to Taos to live with her third husband, Angelo Ravagli. The ranch is now owned by the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque. Georgia O'Keeffe, who knew her in Taos, said in 1974: "Frieda was very special. I can remember very clearly the first time I ever saw her, standing in a doorway, with her hair all frizzed out, wearing a cheap red calico dress that looked as though she'd just wiped out the frying pan with it. She was not thin, and not young, but there was something radiant and wonderful about her." Mainly through her elder sister Else von Richthofen, Frieda became acquainted with many intellectuals and authors, including the socioeconomistAlfred Weber and sociologist Max Weber, the radical psychoanalyst Otto Gross, and the writer Fanny zu Reventlow. By her approval of the dramatization for the theatre of Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover—thought to be based partly on her own relationship as an aristocrat with the working-class Lawrence—it became his only novel ever to be staged. John Harte's play was the only dramatization to be accepted by her, and she did her best to get it produced. Although she loved the play when she read it, the copyright to Lawrence's story had already been acquired by Baron Philippe de Rothschild, who was a close friend. He did not relinquish it until 1960, after his film version had been released. John Harte's play was first produced at The Arts Theatre, London in 1961, five years after her death.
Death
Frieda Lawrence died on her seventy-seventh birthday in Taos.
She is an important character in On the Rocks, a play by Amy Rosenthal which deals with her sometimes difficult relationship with D.H. Lawrence. Lawrence was the inspiration for the character Harriet Somers, played by Judy Davis in the Australian filmKangaroo. The film is based on D.H. Lawrence's semi-autobiographical novel of the same name.
Autobiography
Lawrence, Frieda von Richthofen. Not I, but the Wind... With an afterword by Harry T. Moore. New York: Viking, 1934.
Green, Martin. The von Richthofen Sisters: The Triumphant and the Tragic Modes of Love: Else and Frieda Von Richthofen, Otto Gross, Max Weber, and D.H. Lawrence, in the Years 1870–1970. New York: Basic Books, 1974..
Lawrence, Frieda von Richthofen, Harry T. Moore, and Dale B. Montague, eds. Frieda Lawrence and Her Circle: Letters from, to, and About Frieda Lawrence. London: Macmillan, 1981..
