There has been a tendency over the past decade or so to subtract writers' wives from their husbands' shadows, or even context, and to show them as vigorous, independent people in their own right. Nora Barnacle is a case in point, and Frieda Lawrence is even more tempting as biographer's bait because she long outlived her husband and had a life of her own - and a husband - before she met him.
However, the fact remains that she is mainly of interest because she was Lawrence's wife, and much of this book is inevitably a rehash of what his biographers have already set down. Frieda, predictably, married for a third time, to a certain Captain Angelino Ravagli, and her later life was as uninhibited and globetrotting as ever.