Cody Wells
Mabel Dodge Luhan and Brett at Brett’s house
[1938]
Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers

Dorothy Brett was raised in a wealthy family with connections to British Royalty—as a child she was a playmate of Queen Victoria’s grandchildren—but in Taos, she lived very modestly. For many years, she lived in a one-room cabin on the property of the ranch Mabel Dodge Luhan gave Frieda Lawrence in exchange for the manuscript of her husband’s novel Sons and Lovers.

(below)
Cody Wells
Mabel Dodge Luhan, Frieda Lawrence,
and Brett at Kiowa Ranch
[1938]
Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers

Of D.H. Lawrence’s “Three Fates,” Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant wrote, “Mabel the aesthete; Brett the solitary artist; Frieda the lusty housewife and earth mistress; although not above knifing one another in print, in daily life do not bear grudges. All take the world as it comes, and care little or nothing what is said or thought by anyone—whether it be advocate of the bourgeois conscience or by themselves a day or a year ago.”1