Five Great Books set in NORTHERN ITALY
Novel set in early 20th Century Nottingham and Europe – a novel of Lady Chatterley
23rd April 2019
Frieda by Annabel Abbs, novel set in early 20th Century Nottingham and Europe.
What an interesting subject for a novel! This is a story that charts the relationship between D H Lawrence – miner’s son, poet and creative wordsmith – and Mrs Frieda Weekley, married to straight-laced Ernest, dullard and Professor of Modern Languages with a fondness for etymology and philology. Frieda is an aristocratic Richthofen by birth, a German Baroness, now living in Nottingham with three young children. Her life is rather mundane and dull, her days marked by…”a drifting lethargy..”
She persuades Ernest to let her go to visit her two sisters in avant garde Munich, where the movement for sexual freedom (centred around Café Stefanie in the Amalienstraße, frequented by artists and liberal thinkers) is in full swing. She arrives with her eldest child, Monty, in tow – a mere 6 years old – and upon arrival in the city her first stop late at night is to visit Café Stefanie before she has even offloaded her bags at her sister’s residence. Here she is confronted by the louche life that her sisters espouse, and the Wurst she has promised her son is certainly not going to materialise as anticipated in this locale!
She embraces the profligate culture of free love with gusto and within days she asks Dr Otto Gross to be her lover, who is already her married sister’s lover; contrary to expectation, this does not go down well with her sister, who is already carrying Otto’s child. Frieda returns home to Nottingham, much enlightened and enamoured and is soon off to Amsterdam to meet Otto once again, under the pretext of ministering to her ill sister in Munich. And here for me is the slight rub. The first 2/5ths of the book feel like a whistle stop tour of Frieda’s sexual ripening, readying her for the main focus which is her future relationship with D H Lawrence. The reader is informed of her development, in summary form, so that the coming affair with the great man feels plausible.
Coming from the English culture, which is crawling away from restrictive Victorian values, married to her staid husband, it feels most unlikely that she would have had the liberty or wherewithal to take herself off for a secret assignation to Amsterdam at a whim (which incidentally proves to be a little disappointing for her). Further, trying to engineer a seduction of her husband by a Mrs Bradley (a woman suggested in good faith by her current lover) so that Ernest too can be initiated into the pleasures of the free love movement, seems odd (perhaps it’s true, who knows?). He naturally spurns her. This, of course, serves to reinforce the premise that Frieda is sexually blossoming, now liberated, open and ready for another extra marital relationship. It is scene-setting. The general story of this period of her life is rooted in truth, it just feels a little far fetched in the way it is presented here to the reader.
What comes through loud and clear is Frieda’s starry-eyed and childlike disposition, an inability to see life other than in black and white. There are no shades of grey, of compromise, and this personality trait perhaps is what drew Dr Otto to her in particular, the hint of mental instability that could be tackled by his Freudian talking therapies. She needs to have power for herself, to have passion and to feel alive, to be desired and loved. She takes from the world rather than understanding the balance of give and take in her relationships. Probably at heart she is a woman with narcissistic traits who is in thrall to the women’s liberation movement but almost subjugates herself in her relationships – even at the expense of contact with her beloved children. Her father calling her by a boy’s name (Fritzl) and pushing her to dive head first into a cold lake (note the cover) probably didn’t help her to define her sense of self in her early years and the latent issues are now coming home to roost.
D H Lawrence arrives in the Weekley household and Frieda is smitten within the hour. Within 8 weeks they are an item and travelling to Metz and then, as the lack of finances starts to bite, on towards the Alps and Northern Italy. Ernest and the children are left at home.
Lorenzo, as Frieda now calls him, writes to Ernest about their union and there seem to be few reverberations between the two lovebirds about his rather despicable act. He wants her for himself, to tie her to him. As a creative spirit he needs to suck the life blood out of her in order to be creative. For me the electricity and passion – although verbally expressed – don’t really come across, but the portrait of a rather sad, misguided and at times vapid woman does. There is no response from Frieda when she learns that her erstwhile lover, Dr Otto Gross, is now in a psychiatric unit – she continues, however, to press his letters to her bosom but doesn’t reflect on his demise.
Overall I did actually very much enjoy the book. It was not what I was expecting. I anticipated the vagaries of a sizzling, magnetic liaison, having been prepared by the early narrative – after all Frieda was the inspiration for the original Lady Chatterley. What emerged, however, was a picture of a woman, rather sad, with a very open and naive heart, searching for something, yet never really finding her true “self” – always a cypher for the creativity of others. And someone who sadly came to tolerate abusive behaviour (she had after all been conditioned in childhood by her family). It is a multi-faceted novel that drew me in and took me on a quite a journey.
The author has a great writing talent which was evident in her wonderful novel The Joyce Girl (set in Paris, 5* review).
What a fabulous cover and it was that that convinced me to pick up the book! And I am ultimately very glad that I did.
Tina for the TripFiction Team
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Terrific review, Tina! You’ve managed to put into words exactly what I thought of this book. I enjoyed it but some parts didn’t quite add up. All the same, definitely worth reading.