Young Frieda

John Worthen’s mordantly humorous novel is grounded in reality: it is wholly fictional, but deeply rooted in the lives of real people. All accounts of the life of Frieda von Richthofen Weekley Lawrence Ravagli - best known as the wife of the writer D. H. Lawrence, and one of the models for his Lady Chatterley novel - are hopelessly flawed by the impossibility of understanding her first marriage, to Professor Ernest Weekley. Readers of this novel will discover what Weekley was like as he grew up, how much he loved Frieda, how she felt about him, how she managed to carry on her marriage for thirteen years, how and why she turned to D. H. Lawrence, how she lost her three children to Weekley: and, incidentally, how much Weekley hated Lawrence. These are all here stylishly accounted for by Worthen’s back-to-back, fictional, first-person narratives, which take the reader deep inside Weekley’s point of view, and comprehensively inside Frieda’s: into his rage and bafflement and into her unrepressed anger. At least one tragic history results, and one passionate love story: but whose is which?