Frieda Lawrence (1879–1956)

Frieda Lawrence, née Baroness Emma Maria Frieda Johanna von Richthofen, was born into an aristocratic German family in Metz (present-day France) and received an excellent upper-class education. She was a relative of the famous World War I pilot Manfred von Richthofen, known as the "Red Baron." In 1899, she married Ernest Weekley, a professor of French at University College of Nottingham in England, who was much older than she, and the couple had three children. She fell in love with the writer D.H. Lawrence, who was six years her junior, and eloped with him to Germany; the couple married in 1914. They returned to live in England, but suffered from the anti-German sentiment of the wartime era. The couple were forced to leave their home in Zennor on the coast of Cornwall and surrender their passports to the government. After the war, they were again allowed to travel, and visited Europe, Asia, Australia, and the USA. The marriage was tempestuous and dramatic. With Lawrence’s death in 1930, Frieda retired to their home in Taos, New Mexico. She eventually married a third time in 1952 to the painter Angelo Ravagli. Frieda wrote a memoir of life with Lawrence entitled Not I But The Wind (1935) and her own memoirs, which were edited and published posthumously as Frieda Lawrence: The Memoirs and Correspondence (1961).