It's great to be in a position to recommend much more diverse books to our young people at school. Building the senior school library as a place where students actually come and find books that they want to read as opposed to books that teachers think they ought to read is an important responsibility and one we take really seriously.
Books like this are such a positive move as they will appeal to a broader set of readers than we are usually attracting. Dealing with modern issues in a clear and captivating way with a strong narrative voice and characters that the students can relate to is critical as we move forwards. This book is both an intelligent and compelling read that will hold even the most reluctant reader's attention and keep them turning the pages long into the night. It keeps the reader on their toes and ensures that you give it your full attention too. I found myself thinking about its characters and events even when I wasn't reading it and looking forward to snatching kore time with it and I hope that my students feel the same. An accessible, gripping and engrossing read that I can't recommend highly enough. Will absolutely be buying a copy for the library and heartily recommending it to both staff and students.

Having grown up with family connections to D H Lawrence i was intrigued to read this book. Frieda was always painted as a harsh woman. This book gives us a very different insight into a life and what she gave up along the way.
A wonderful book. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this ARC.

Historical fiction at its best.Frieda brought to life the women who inspired D.h.Lawrence her story her personality life and times.Highly recommend #net galley##johnmurraypress

I am not usually a fan of fictionalised biographies but found Annabel Abb's, Frieda an engrossing and entertaining novel. Abb's Frieda is someone you can sympathise with but can also feel intense frustration as she uncovers her true desires. Highly recommended.

Frieda was the inspiration for D H Lawrence creative output for several years. This is her story of how her style of life and living changed dramatically through her lifetime along with her relationships which weren't always harmonious.

This was a fantastic, gripping, and moving story that painted a vivid picture of Frieda's life and struggles. An invigorating insight into the story behind one of the world's most loved novels. Brilliant writing.

I've read this novel as I really liked D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley. Reading about the woman who inspired Lady Chatterley was intriguing. I don't normally read fictionalised biographies, true stories.
The book didn't disappoint. I think it was quite a good read and I was really affected by how much Frieda had to give up, but then isn't all cheating females punished somehow, take your Madame Bovary or Karenina..

I would recommend for historical fiction fans.

An engaging and well paced read, Frieda accounts the life of Freida Von Richtofen, beginning with a visit from her sister that sheds an unflattering light on her frigid marriage to then husband Ernest Weekley. This begins a journey in pursuit of a more fulfilling life seeking satisfaction emotionally, physically and intellectually.

Abbs' writing avoids sliding into Fifty Shadesesque detail, skirting specific descriptions of Frieda's sexual awakening and focussing instead on her personal nourishment and growth. Her use of figurative speech is compelling as she writes about: "catkins and the tiny leaves unfurling like miniature green parasols"; her heroine's "two lives amorphous and flaccid, like a fat mollusc between two rocks, its tentacles drifting this way and that with the current"; how the memory of her son's "baby face receded, like a balloon drifting over the horizon." I also very much enjoyed her used of alliteration to add rhythm and poignancy to her writing. Examples include: "Their silent superiority. The snide sneers, the slights, the snubs." and "the paucity of his past, the promise of his future, the unpredictability of him." Perhaps there are one too many times that Frieda buries her nose in the necks and hair of her children to breathe in "lilac and wet grass" to ease "the pounding of her heart" but to no great detriment.

So, the question I am left asking myself is whether I actually like Freida. Can I sympathise with her position? Do I champion the decision she made to leave her children to embrace the self that she believed she deserved to be? Well, no. I think, perhaps in an attempt to encourage the reader to side with her main character, Annabel Abbs has vilified Ernest Weekley; casting him as unsympathetic, work obsessed and repressed. Almost driven insane by Frieda's desertion; unable to offer any consolation for his poor children. It is only in the footnotes where Abbs relents and is much kinder, describing him as "an exceptional man' who was "destroyed" by Lawrence. But, for me, her betrayal is untenable. Of course, had Lawrence not spent the last (and most industrious) 18 years of his life with her, we would not have the wealth of literature that he produced and the literary world would have been much poorer for it.

The Frieda of this novel is the woman D.H. Lawrence fell in love with and married. At the time they met she was the wife of an academic and mother of three children. She ran away to be with Lawrence not realising that her husband would not allow her access to her children. This was a reality for many women stuck in unhappy marriages.

Frieda von Richthofen was a woman born before her time. German by birthright she never came to terms with the rigid British lifestyle she married into and when the brilliant Lawrence entered her life she willingly gave up everything for him and became the model for his best known, and scandalous for the time (the early 20th century), books.

Once again Annabel Abbs has written the perfect novel of a real woman. I loved The Joyce Girl and Frieda doesn't disappoint. I can't wait to read which woman Annabel Abbs sets her sights on next. Her research is impeccable but never overwhelms her story. Highly recommended. Many thanks to NetGalley and Two Roads for the opportunity to read and review Frieda.

I love that Frieda was at the center of this story. I enjoyed this historical biography. Her character was charming, very well written.
I would read more from this author.

A novel which creatively inhabits its characters, which has a flowing prose and which also offers a historicised view into the cultural and intellectual struggles of the time that ranged from Freud's theoretical framework to the suffragettes. Even though historical verasity is almost inevitably lost, Frieda is portrayed as a courageous person, as exceptionally modern for her time period and as, some may say, even a radical in her own way.

I often struggle with fictional biographies/biographical fiction because too often writers move from well-known episode to well-known episode and offer up a more coherent, even simplistic, narrative of a life. Abbs, I'm pleased and relieved to note, doesn't do either. Instead she offers a more chaotic and inconsistent version of Frieda, a woman who makes decisions then doubles back, whose emotions shift and change - which feels far more realistic than a one-note character.

Frieda really is at the heart of this book so that Lawrence doesn't make an appearance until about 40% in. Abbs doesn't allow him to hijack her story, and the volatile relationship that ensues is viewed via Frieda's needs, her agonies over the loss of her children, her satisfactions.

The novel is billed as ' The original Lady Chatterley' but while Frieda seems to have contributed to the portrait of Constance, she has more complicated incarnations as Ursula Brangwen in The Rainbow and Women in Love.

A book, then, which creatively inhabits its characters and which also offers an impressive historicised look into the cultural and intellectual ferment of the time that ranged from Freud to the suffragettes even while adulterous married women were legally forced to have no relationship with their children (till they came of age). I don't know enough about the real Frieda Lawrence to comment on historical accuracy, but imaginatively this is a persuasive and nuanced portrait of a courageous, sometimes difficult, woman.