D. H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage [Paperback]

Brenda Maddox (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 17, 1996

Drawing on nearly 2,000 previously unpublished letters, Brenda Maddox presents a rich and startlingly new portrait of D. H. Lawrence: a hilarious mimic, a lover of nature, an inspired teacher, a brilliant journalist, an ecological visionary, and, above all - a married man.

This award-winning work examines Lawrence's perplexing, restless life through the greatest contradiction in it - his marriage - taking it not just as another aspect of Lawrence but as the encompassing whole. His marriage to Frieda von Richthofen Weekley was a mismatch made in heaven, and yet it lasted until the tubercular Lawrence lost his heroic struggle for life, a struggle in which, he told Frieda, "nothing mattered but you." Or so she claimed.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Maddox's (Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom) epic biography, drawing on 2000 previously unpublished letters, portrays the volatile union between "the genius and the Valkyrie" with subtlety, wit and compassion. The novels of British modernist Lawrence (1885-1930) incite carking disagreement; Lady Chatterley's Lover has been characterized as a frank and lyrical exploration of erotic love and "the foulest book in English literature." As the author shows, the conflicts that animate Lawrence's fiction-between the miner and the aristocrat, exuberant heterosexuality and ambivalent homoeroticism, the Tory and the iconoclast-were grounded not only in his parents' hostile marriage, but also in his own. Yet Maddox carefully explores the bonds that allowed a match between such different people-irascible, tubercular Lawrence and outspoken, sexually adventurous Baroness Frieda von Richthofen Weekley-not only to endure but to flourish. That two such hyperbolic temperaments, riding the crest of the avant-garde, found solace and sustenance in homely domesticity is a beguiling theme of this remarkable book. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Maddox, best known for Nora (LJ 6/15/88), her excellent biography of James Joyce's wife, chooses to examine Lawrence's life "through the greatest contradiction in it: his marriage" to Frieda von Richthofen Weekley. This perspective gives effective shape to her book. Maddox was able to make use of all seven volumes of the Cambridge University Press's edition of Lawrence's letters, but her biography doesn't claim great originality. Instead, it offers a vivid, balanced, readable, and occasionally jarring portrait of Lawrence and Frieda and their "mismatch made in heaven." Livelier than Jeffrey Meyer's D.H. Lawrence (LJ 5/15/90), another recent mass-market life of Lawrence, Maddox's work aims for a more general audience than the authoritative three-volume Cambridge biography, one volume of which has been published (John Worthen, D.H. Lawrence: The Early Years, 1885-1912, LJ 7/91). For general literature collections.
Keith Cushman, Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 656 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (June 17, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393314545
• ISBN-13: 978-0393314540
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,281,758 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A compulsively readable portrait of the great DHL, January 3, 2000

By 

ALAN PROCTOR (California, U.S.A) - See all my reviews

This review is from: D. H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage (Paperback)

This book won the Whitbread prize in the U.K.-and deservedly so. It is a thoroughly researched, vivid and well written portrait of a brilliant miner's son writing against a death sentence he would never acknowledge-tuberculosis. After assisting the death of his all-important mother, Lawrence was supported by a wife whom he stole from another man (actually, she had him in bed within 20 minutes of meeting him, in her then-husband's house, too.) Freida was highly sexed and also almost compulsively unfaithful to him. They had dreadful fights, but somehow never actually split up. Brings alive the hothouse intellectual atmosphere of the Fabians, Freidians and Edwardian England, and the awful (and for Lawrence personally humiliating) cultural oppression of both Britain and America in the teens and twenties. You also get to travel around the world with the couple-Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Ceylon, Australia, Taos N.M., and Mexico, meeting the famous and infamous as you go. And with many well-chosen excerpts from Lawrence's letters, poetry and novels, you get a level of understanding of where his books came from which is very helpful in appreciating them. And him. I made the mistake of taking this book to Las Vegas. I didn't do any gambling.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Creative non-fiction?, June 5, 2007

By 

D. Eshleman "slightly foxed" (Fort Worth, TX) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: D. H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage (Paperback)

Maddox's biography of Lawrence provides a thorough, engaging and thoughtful analysis of the artist's life and work through a lens trained on his relationships with his wife and the other women and men who figured prominently in the shaping of his personality and, by extension, his literary legacy. While revealing the warts-and-all ugliness of Lawrence's frequent rages and his verbal, physical and fictional abusiveness toward those near him, the narrative reaches for and often achieves a tenuous balance that simultaneously acknowledges and deflects (or dampens) criticism of Lawrence, leaving us with a portrait of a very conflicted human when one could just as easily see a monster. In that regard, the book is rich in detail, but one has to wonder about the scale on which the facts are weighed and measured, particularly in light of such breezily passed over statements as "Frieda and Ravagli bought a house near Galveston, at Port Isabel, Texas . . ." when those two cities are about as close to each other as Boston is to Baltimore. From a great height, perhaps one could view Lawrence as Maddox does, but if one had to put on shoes and walk the same path, similar conclusions are doubtful.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Gossipy Fluff!, February 28, 2007

By 

Uncle Borges (Via Lungomare 6) - See all my reviews

This review is from: D.H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage (Hardcover)

gossipy fluff from the distorted view-point of the politically correct dogma. Lawrence and Frieda were far more complex personalities (naturally troubled, but which real marriage is not?); for best portrayal of Lawrence and his marital roller coaster ride with Frieda, read Richard Aldington. One of the best biographies ever. Lawrence's best novels also offer a wealth of clues to this famously stormy, larger-than-life marriage. What an amazing couple! To think that Frieda, coming from one the most famous German aristocratic families, left her loveless marriage and three kids, and eloped with the war-resisting nearly penniless miner's son who will incidentally turn into one of the great authors of the 20th century!