Frieda, in her autobiography, writes passionately, and with clarity, about the first time she and Lawrence met, and their subsequent meetings:

” He came on Easter Sunday. It was a bright, sunny day. The children were in the garden hunting for Easter eggs.

” What I couldn’t understand is how he could have loved and wanted me at that time. I certainly did have what he called ’sex in the head’. [But] My real self was frightened and shrank from contact like a wild thing.

” So our relationship developed.

” One day we met at a station in Derbyshire. My two small girls were with us. We went for a walk through the early spring woods and fields. The children were running here and there as young creatures will.

” We came to a small brook, a little stone bridge crossed it. Lawrence made the children some paper boats and put matches in them and let them float downstream under the bridge. Crouched by the brook, playing there with the children, Lawrence forgot about me completely.

” Suddenly I knew I loved him. He had touched a new tenderness in me. After that things happened quickly.”

Less than a month later Frieda left her son with her unsuspecting husband, took her two daughters to stay with their grandparents in Hampstead Heath and, ” blind and blank with pain, dimly feeling I should never again live with them as I had done…”, met Lawrence at Charing Cross Station, where they caught a train for Dover, crossed the English Channel, and, a day later, ended-up at Frieda’s mother’s home at Metz in Germany.

Lawrence made an instant hit with Frieda’s mother, who was at the height of her aristocratic beauty, and always dressed in the most chic of Paris fashions.

” You can go with him. You can trust this man.” She told her daughter.

Lawrence and Frieda than began to live the life of the liesured classes (paid for by Frieda’s mother) and travelled widely across Europe. They’d walk in the Alps, then down into Italy, staying in smart hotels, hotels where they met such people as writer Middleton Murry, and the writer and editor, Edward Garnett, who in turn introduced Lawrence to the Asquiths and Morrells. And it was by meeting these hugely influential people that Lawrence began to build upon the initial success he’d had with his early poems, published by Ford Maddox Hueffer (later Ford Maddox Ford), in his November 1909 edition of the English Review; poems that had been sent secretly to Hueffer by Jessie Chambers.

After lengthy divorce proceedings, and a threat from Professor Weekley that Frieda would never see her children again ( she did manage to see them on several occasions), Lawrence and Frieda married at Kensington Register Office, London, on July 13th, 1914.

It was an unconventional, and stormy, marriage from the outset, but always passionate, with Frieda the ideal companion, and champion of her husband’s work.

With the outbreak of war in 1914 the Lawrences began to look for a place they could escape the patriotic overload going on around them.

Read Part One of this feature D.H.Lawrence – Cornwall 1916

Also read Michael Squires biography of the Lawrence’s marriage.