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mind to stop teaching, at least in England. In his book, Burgess suggests that this decision was forced on him by the school authorities, who did not want Lawrence infecting the children with his illness. It was in this context that he visited his former professor Ernest Weekley to ask for assistance in securing a position abroad. Weekley’s wife, Frieda von Richthofen, daughter of a German baron, and Lawrence were immediately drawn to each other. Not long after this first meeting, Frieda invited Lawrence to her home when her husband was away. Rather than have an affair with Frieda, Lawrence insisted that she tell her husband about them. Frieda did not do so immediately, but Lawrence joined her when Frieda traveled to her native Germany to visit her family. It was during this visit that Lawrence helped Frieda compose a letter to Weekley, informing him of the couple’s intent to stay together. It was obviously a momentous event for them both. For Lawrence, in particular, eloping with Frieda marked a turning point in his creative as well as his social and spiritual life. In Italy, where Lawrence and Frieda finally settled, the two found, if not complete harmony (Frieda admitted publicly that they “fought like hell”) certainly a life of travel and interesting friends. Lawrence entered then into one of his most fertile periods of work—beginning in 1912 when Lawrence began Sons and Lovers and culminating in 1920 with the publication of Women in Love—that ranks as one of the greatest and most fertile periods of any writer in the twentieth century.

In Germany, the miner’s son, Bert of Eastwood, having stolen the wife of a respected professor, rubbing shoulders with a German aristocracy that only a few months before could have existed only as a figment of his imagination, and above all, having found love, had certainly arrived. “I am living here with a lady whom I love, and whom I shall marry when I come to England, if possible... ,” Lawrence wrote Louie Burrows, a former girlfriend, trying desperately to mask his pride in his new circumstance. “We have been together as man and wife for six months, nearly, now, and I hope we shall always remain man and wife.” In Germany he received a copy of his second novel, The Trespasser, which Hueffer also helped publish, though he felt it was an even more flawed work of genius than The White Peacock. It speaks well of Hueffer that he was able to judge Lawrence’s genius and assist him, even though he later claimed not to have liked Lawrence. Lawrence and Frieda settled in Gargnano, Italy, where over the next two years, Lawrence completed Sons and Lovers, began the novel he originally called The Sisters, published Love Poems and Others, and wrote perhaps his greatest short story, “The Prussian Officer.”

In 1914 Lawrence and Frieda were back in England. Weekley had stopped stalling over the divorce from Frieda, which was finalized in July, making it possible for Lawrence and Frieda to wed. The marriage took place on July 13, at the South Kensington Registry Office. They did not have long to celebrate: Two weeks later war broke out, and Lawrence and Frieda were prevented from obtaining passports and forced to spend the war years in England. Critics and biographers often portray these years in England as an unmitigated disaster that left Lawrence an all but broken man. This is given credence to some extent by Lawrence himself, who in his writing after the war fumed against the democratic system that he felt had abused and humiliated him and made it all but impossible for him to work. The truth is that, despite significant difficulties, these were the most productive years of Lawrence’s life. The incredible output of quality writing that seemed to have reached its apogee in Italy under the inspiration of Frieda not only continued in England, but reached a new zenith. Lawrence was again hard at work on The Sisters. In February 1915 he reported that he had already revised it seven times. Lawrence would eventually divide the novel in two. The first part became The Rainbow, which traces the lives of