Biographer John Worthen says he’s discovered the identity of the model for D.H. Larence‘s most famous character, Lady Chatterly: none other than Lawrence’s own wife, Frieda Lawrence. In a new biography of Lawrence being published this week, Worthen says “the affair at the heart of the novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover was inspired by a relationship between DH Lawrence’s wife and an Italian soldier,” Angelo Ravagli, while Lawrence was “stricken by tuberculosis and unable to have sex.” According to a Daily Telegraph story, Worthen conclusions are based on “previously unread letters written by Frieda . . . written in the 1920s to her mother, Anna von Richtofen, a cousin of Manfred von Richtofen, the First World War fighter pilot who was nicknamed the Red Baron. The letters . . . speak of Frieda’s frustration at the constant self–sacrifice of living with an invalid and include details of her love affair with Ravagli,” whom she went on to marry after Lawrence’s death. Worthen also postulated that “the book could be seen as a tribute by Lawrence to his wife and as a kind of substitute for their once-active sex life.”