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Though Frieda and Lawrence quarreled they never separated for long. She shared his nomad existence 18 years, in Europe, Ceylon, Australia, the U. S., was with him in his last days on the Riviera. "I enjoyed being poor and I didn't want to play a role in the world." The thing she missed most was her children, whom she saw only secretly, at bitterly long intervals. The Lawrences quarreled not only with each other but with most of their friends. Their friendship with Katherine Mansfield and Middleton Murry "was the only spontaneous and jolly" one they had. And, as every Lawrentian knows, even that did not last forever. As for Lawrence's women worshipers, Frieda put up with them as long, as she could, then made a scene. One day in Taos, N. Mex., whither they had been invited by Mabel Dodge Sterne Luhan (Lorenzo in Taos), "Mabel came over and told me she didn't think I was the right woman for Lawrence and other things equally upsetting and I was thoroughly roused and said: 'Try it then yourself, living with a genius, see what it is like and how easy it is, take him if you can.'" Frieda continued to keep him. As Lawrence lay dying he said to her: "Why, oh why, did we quarrel so much?" She answered: "Such as we were, violent creatures, how could we help it?"
Frieda Lawrence's book will be read mostly on her husband's account, but readers will find in it things of her own. Her shrewd judgment of him as a man: "In his heart of hearts I think he always dreaded women, felt that they were in the end more powerful than men." And her indignant denial that in Lawrence there was anything of the pornographer: "Passionate people don't need tricks."