Husband and wife team Michael Squires and Lynn K. Talbot spent six years researching the lives of husband and wife D.H. Lawrence and Frieda von Richthofen to write the biography Living at the Edge.
As a result, the book "offers eye-opening new perspectives on Lawrence's writings as it chronicles the troubled but passionate union of this fascinating couple --" according to Dennis Jackson, past editor of the D.H. Lawrence Review.
Lawrence, author of such novels as The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley's Lover, and von Richthofen had a vital but stormy relationship. They also clashed philosophically with the industrial world around them, giving their lives a turbulence that found its way into his works.
Squires, a professor of English at Virginia Tech, and Talbot, professor of Spanish at Roanoke College, researched a great many original, unpublished sources, particularly von Richthofen's letters, and interviewed people who knew the couple to produce a biography that adds new insight into their lives. The biographers use an unusual technique in their book: They write separate biographies of Lawrence and von Richthofen until the two meet in 1912 and then a dual biography as the couple moves about the world -- to Italy, Cornwall, Australia, Mexico, and New Mexico -- to escape the conformist society in which they live.
Lawrence used his writings to work out the issues in his life, particularly difficult relationships -- between mothers and sons, husbands and wives, people and their societies. Squires and Talbot "reveal the extreme care with which he rewrote his personal experience to satisfy his deepest needs, and they introduce the many influential people who entered the Lawrences' lives and work," according to the publisher, the University of Wisconsin Press. "The rich materials from Frieda's letters reveal a different Lawrence -- more difficult as a man but more interesting as an artist; they also reveal a different Frieda -- more vibrant as a woman, more substantial as a companion."
Those letters actually are responsible for the decision by Squires and Talbot to write the biography. "For years we collected Frieda Lawrence's letters -- hundreds and hundreds of them," they said in the preface to the book. "Some were laid inside books we found for sale; others were kept in drawers or hidden in libraries around the world. Few had been published. One day we realized that in many ways Frieda's letters altered the life story of D.H. Lawrence. How, we asked, can readers understand a novelist of towering genius, like Lawrence, without knowing about his wife's personality and influence? How could his novels and stories and poems -- many of them strongly autobiographical -- be fully fathomed without drawing insight from her character? On that day we began this biography -- focused naturally on Lawrence as the major figure, but taking its direction from the rich material in Frieda's letters, which at last count numbered sixteen hundred."
Use of the unpublished letters enabled the couple to "produce a fresh, fair-minded, richly textured life of the English novelist and his vibrant German wife," wrote Keith Cushman, past president of the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America. "Living at the Edge is -- exceptionally sensitive to the complex dynamics of the Lawrences' marriage."
Carolyn G. Heilbrun wrote in a review in The New Leader magazine, "I would highly recommend {Living at the Edge} to any young person wishing to read a biography of Lawrence, or to any older person interested in seeing where studies of this writer stand these days. It takes into account the major earlier works on Lawrence, and benefits from a careful reconsideration of previously published opinions and interpretations."
"Squires and Talbot achieve their goals of seeing 'the Lawrences whole' and of writing 'a biography that values, above all else, understanding,'" wrote Howard Harper of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "They expand the frontiers of our understanding of both Lawrence and Frieda."
Squires is a past president of the D.H. Lawrence Society of America and the author and editor of numerous other books about D.H. Lawrence, including the Penguin edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover. He and Talbot are now compiling and editing the complete letters of Frieda Lawrence.
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