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"She is ripping — she’s the finest woman I’ve never met — you must, above all, meet her. She’s the daughter of Baron von Richtofen. She’s splendid, she really is." Ninety-four years ago, on April 17, 1912, D.H. Lawrence wrote those words to a friend, also well-known in literary circles, Edward Garnett. The woman who had inspired Lawrence to express his feelings so ecstatically was the wife of his teacher at Nottingham University, Earnest Weekly. Several years ago the renowned commentator and critic, Malcolm Muggeridge, reviewing a book called Frieda Lawrence by Robert Lucas by Robert Lucas published in the USA by the Viking Press, had this to say about the man who had created such a furore in literary and legal circles. "It always seemed clear to me, on internal evidence, that Lawrence must have been impotent when he wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover but now Mr Lucas establishes beyond any shadow of doubt that he was, and quotes Frieda, who must be considered an authority on the subject, as complaining noisily about it." Anyway, soon after Lawrence wrote his letter to Garnett, Frieda obtained a divorce from her husband and, accompanied by her three children, went to live with Lawrence in Italy. Muggeridge continues his remorseless review by saying that Frieda had become an obsession with Lawrence and in one guise or other, kept on appearing in his novels, rarely allowing him to display his great talent as a descriptive writer. He quoted from the novel Kangaroo in which Lawrence gives a superbly observed picture of Australia, but, too briefly, because of his hopeless efforts to measure up to Frieda’s clamorous sexual appetite. "A poorly equipped Canute confronting an exceptionally high tide." Muggeridge claimed that in his famous novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence had projected himself as the gamekeeper, Mellor and Frieda as Lady ‘C’. But, he added, "the bitter truth is that if Lawrence is anyone in the story it was the crippled and impotent Sir Clifford Chatterley and if there was a Mellor in Frieda’s life it was not Lawrence but Ravagli." Angelo Ravagli was an Italian army officer whom the Lawrences had befriended while living in Italy. He became Frieda’s lover and when Lawrence died of T.B in 1930, Frieda moved to New Mexico, to be followed there shortly by Ravagli. In 1950, the latter persuaded his wife to grant him a divorce whereupon he married Frieda. Six years later, when Frieda died he inherited half the Lawrence fortune, greatly augmented later by the growing royalties from Lady Chatterly’s Lover. What is more, as his divorce and remarriages were illegal in Italy, he was able to return to his wife and family. What sort of person was this Frieda Lawrence whose cousin, another Richtofen, known as the ‘Red Baroni’, became Germany’s ace pilot during World War I? Much of her character is revealed in a collection of her letters edited by two researchers, Harry T. Moore and Dale B. Montague and published by the Macmillan Press. That she was overly fond of money is clear from her correspondence with Edward Titus, the American husband of the famous cosmetician Helena Rubenstein who had brought out a special edition of Lady ‘C’ in Paris in 1929 when the book was banned in England. Frieda was in sore straits financially while Lawrence’s probate was being argued in the courts, the other two claimants to his estate, having been his brother George and his sister Ada. In almost every letter she harped on this subject and Titus, against his better judgement, kept advancing her money. He hinted, however, that pirated copies of the book were being sold in England, and not without her knowledge. "Send me 10,000 Francs" she says in one of her letters, "as I spend a little more now with Barby’s (her daughter from Weekley) x-rays." In another letter written a year later, she says, "You will know by now that the Capitano Ravagli is with me, O, scandal! We have been fond of each other for years and that an old bird like me is still capable of real passion." In June 1932, Ada Lawrence, writing to an aunt about her sister-in-law, says, "The homage paid to her as the widow of D.H.L goes to her head and fills her with a false of self-importance." And yet, Frieda Lawrence had a large circle of friends, many of them celebrities of the day — Bernard Shaw, Somerset Maugham, Aldous Huxley and the poet-novelist, Richard Aldington who, with his wife and child, went all the way to New Mexico to stay with her on her ranch where, apparently, the Capitano and Frieda did little more than drink and take long siestas.
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