D. H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage Book

Maddox presents a richly detailed and startlingly new portrait of D. H. Lawrence: not the bearded prophet with the baleful eye, not the sickly and self-absorbed sexual outlaw, but a vulnerable, sensitive Lawrence, a hilarious mimic, a lover of nature, an inspired teacher, a brilliant journalist, an ecological visionary, and above all - as he saw himself - a married man. The prize-winning author of Nora (Mrs. James Joyce) examines Lawrence's perplexing, restless life through the greatest contradiction in it - his marriage to Frieda, a woman even more defiant of conventional morality than he was. Theirs was a mismatch made in heaven, a marriage with infidelities on both sides, verbal taunts and physical abuse, separations, and the strains of Lawrence's long struggle with tuberculosis. Yet her determined influence on his life and work cannot be overestimated, and they remained together until his bitter, tragic death.

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Maddox's (Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom) epic biography, drawing on 2000 previously unpublished letters, portrays the volatile union between ``the genius and the Valkyrie'' with subtlety, wit and compassion.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. (Nov.)