Frieda Lawrence (1879-1956)
An important, unpublished series of letters to A.S. Frere Reeves, 1931-1936
46 autograph letters signed with initial (‘F’), one autograph postcard signed and one typed letter signed to A.S. Frere Reeves, Vence, the Villa Bernaria at Spotorno, Savona, Florence, Kiowa Ranch (Taos, New Mexico), Paris, London, Heidelberg, St. Cyr, Buenos Aires, Hollywood and elsewhere, 4 April 1931-13 May 1936

131 pages, various sizes. Provenance: Christie's, 16 October 1985, lot 87.

The unseen Frieda Lawrence: an important collection of unpublished letters, written following the death of D.H. Lawrence, of particular interest for revealing the woman behind the more-famous husband, her marriage to D.H. Lawrence and the difficulties encountered after his death. The correspondence with Alexander Stuart Frere Reeves, editor (later chairman) at William Heinemann, covers her marriage to D.H. Lawrence, the battles over his estate following his death in Vence in 1930, the writing of Not I, but the wind (1934), the publication of many early biographies and memoirs of D.H. Lawrence, and Frieda Lawrence's character and her relationships with Angelo Ravagli and A.S. Frere Reeves.

The root of many of Frieda Lawrence’s problems was that ‘[D.H.] Lawrence had not the strength both to produce and to look after affairs – So affairs had to go’ (4 April, 1931), leaving many loose ends with regard to the publication of his works both in Europe and in the U.S.A. Her letters to Frere Reeves, whose firm had published Lawrence's novel The White Peacock and which was to publish Aldous Huxley's The Letters of D.H. Lawrence are not mere business letters. Rather, they display the trust and confidence which Frieda Lawrence had in Frere Reeves and in his business judgement ‘his [D.H. Lawrence's] spirit is a living spark in you – Frere – it makes me so glad that I feel in you the same thing that he stood for – It's strange, Lawrence has only left gladness in me, but it hurts’ (n.d.). The tone of the letters is confidential and the range of subjects discussed correspondingly wide. Frieda Lawrence was often stung into defence of her marriage with Lawrence by what she saw as ill-natured or unfounded criticism: 'Murry's book, well the less I say the better [...] Lawrence was so infinitely more than his books – Fancy, Murry says he was impotent, the lie, the lie, I ought to know, far from it’ (n.d.) and, in 1931, ‘Here are Lawrence's first letters to me [not present] – all I have practically – this is the man who couldn't love and didn't love me!! Doesn't it make one sick’ (6 November 1931). Her unprompted recollections of Lawrence, and of places where they had lived together are moving: ‘I have just come back from the grave, sat on the border and smoked a long cigarette – it bucks me up – As if he said: “Now you go and live and attend to your 'jobs' – I still feel the wings of his love so sure and safe […] One loves, but differently at 50! But one has to make the change’ (n.d.), or describing her return to the Villa Mirenda on ‘a hot still autumn day, there it lay asleep with closed shutters dreaming, grapes still on the vines butterflies, blue and yellow among the flowers, a woman putting a bunch of roses in front of a little shrine all so still and yet delicately alive, that tender quiver of life that Lawrence knew so well, I wept and wept, but not bitterly – There Lawrence wrote his Lady C and painted the pictures’ (n.d.).

Many of Frieda Lawrence's well known dislikes at that time – of George Lawrence (D.H. Lawrence's brother), Laurence Pollinger (his literary agent), Caresse Crosby, Mabel Dodge Luhan, J. Middleton Murry are vividly documented in these letters. These were exacerbated in particular by the wrangling over Lawrence's estate: ‘[Pollinger] hates me now because I don't do what he wants and George [Lawrence] of course gets swollenheaded and is the great man – Firmly fixed in my mind is that Lawrence wanted me to have everything – he said so. I wonder he hasn't turned up again and Kicked George […] Lawrence loved me as I was, a crèpy weeping willow of a widow he would have loathed' (n.d.); elsewhere, 'Murry has found his will and wrote he was the only man that really knows Lawrence and the only man I can trust […] And come again to-morrow! was a phrase of Lorenzo's’ (n.d.). Frieda Lawrence was aware of her own vehemence – ‘I just do go off like a cracker’ (2 September, 1931) – but abhorred sentimentality: ‘George [Lawrence] hopes to meet Lawrence again in the next world. I would like to hear the conversation, wouldn't you’ (ibid.).

Her fight to vindicate her interpretation of D.H. Lawrence's legacy – both literary and financial – was unremitting, as these letters show. She was also at work at this time on her own memoir Not I, but the Wind – 'the one or two people I have shown it to, wept, so what more do you want' (n.d.) – and encouraged Aldous Huxley – ‘a lonely bird’ (n.d.) – in his edition of Lawrence's letters. She also gave rather condescending approval to the memoir published by Earl and Achsah Brewster in 1932, D.H. Lawrence, Reminiscences and Correspondence: ‘the Brewsters' mild little say will do no harm, they were good to him […] and loved him’ (n.d.). Others mentioned in the letters include Pino Orioli, Ottoline and Philip Morrell, the Bertrand Russells, Richard Aldington, S.S. Koteliansky and Edward Garnett. The letters also contain autobiographical material about her relationship with Angelo Ravagli, 'It is queer living with a man so different from Lorenzo, so different’ (n.d.), whom she was eventually to marry in 1950.

The overriding impression of these letters is of Frieda Lawrence's remarkable vitality – ‘I danced like an ancient waterfall at a cowboy dance last night’ (n.d.) or ‘I feel I ought to have done with desire at my time of life and I can't do it’ – and her great love for D.H. Lawrence: ‘I have just wept bitterly over L's letters to Garnett and I felt I didn't deserve his love, but then how dull if I had deserved it!’.