Frieda Lawrence

Summary

KM’s feelings toward Frieda Lawrence are characterised by fieriness but, while her relationship with D. H. Lawrence balanced ire with love, KM’s attitude toward Frieda tended overwhelmingly toward fury. How unforgettable is her searing outburst to JMM of 11 May 1915 – ‘What a great fat sod she is – I should like to send a pig to kill her – a real filthy pig’ – which precedes the conclusion ‘Lawrence has got queer blind places, hasn’t he?’ The two couples met as a group in June 1913 in the Chancery Lane office where Rhythm’s brief reincarnation as the Blue Review was breathing its last gasps. The summer after, KM and JMM acted as witnesses at the Lawrences’ wedding in Kensington, and Frieda gifted KM the wedding ring from her first marriage to Lawrence’s professor at University College, Nottingham. Frieda had three young children with her first husband and, as an adulteress, she was obliged by law to relinquish her care of them – they had to stay with their father.

In 1916, Mansfield, JMM and the Lawrences lived together in Cornwall in separate cottages at Higher Tregerthen, near Zennor, Cornwall. The social experiment, an early incarnation of the Rananim community, was inharmonious and therefore unsuccessful. KM and JMM were poor and found the behaviour of the Lawrences increasingly barbaric and graceless; as KM wrote to Beatrice Campbell on 4 May 1916: ‘They are both too rough for me to enjoy playing with.’ (See CL1, p. 505.) KM brings their violent quarrels to vivid life in her letters from Zennor. KM disliked Frieda’s influence on DHL, and compared her suffocating effect on him to that which she experienced in Ida Baker’s presence (see letter of 25 February 1918 to JMM). However, it should be said that DHL felt Frieda’s effect upon him to be largely beneficent, believing that she helped him to ‘let go a bit’ (the importance of this is underlined by his belief that the ‘inability to let go’ to be what was ‘killing the modern England’), and helping him to explore and extend his personal philosophies

The surviving correspondence from KM to Frieda exists only in draft form and is extremely limited, with KM’s first letter warm and open, and the second more guarded, brief and alluding to misunderstandings ahead of the Zennor venture.