Lawrence's affair with Alice Dax began while he was still engaged to Louie Burrows but, about a year after his mother's death, a serious illness had led the doctors to decide that he was threatened with consumption and forced him to take time off work. It was while he was convalescing in Bournemouth that he decided he would not go back to school teaching but instead risk trying to make his way as a professional writer. That this meant he would have no reliable, steady income, and therefore be unable to save up to be married, was perhaps not the only reason he then felt he had for breaking with Louie, although he always remained fond of her. If she was in the future only a minor source of guilt, it was because she was overshadowed by Jessie Chambers as a major one.

The affair with Alice Dax would no doubt have gone on after these events had she not been superseded by another dissatisfied wife, although one who was perhaps less angrily so. Having decided to give up his secure job, Lawrence was considering going to Germany as a language assistant, to gain new experiences, have more time for his writing and at least earn something. He therefore decided to seek the help of Professor Ernest Weekley, the man who had taught him French and German when he was at what is now Nottingham University. In early March, he went to visit Weekley at his house in a prosperous area of Nottingham and had lunch with both him and his wife.

The meeting with Frieda Weekley broke not just the sexual but also the emotional log-jam for Lawrence. ‘Whoever loved that loved not at first sight’ says Phoebe in As You Like It and both Romeo and Juliet would have agreed. The French call this experience the coup de foudre and there seems little doubt that, for the first time in his life, that is what Lawrence experienced. It was not long before he was calling Frieda ‘the most wonderful woman in all England’. There are not many treatments of the coup de foudre in Lawrence's fiction, but there are some, although they hardly accord to the conventional type.