Letters from Dorothy Brett, 1929 to 1935.

Abstract

In mid-1929 Kathleen Cooke, a third-year Arts student at Melbourne University in Australia, was given permission to write her English thesis on Katherine Mansfield who had died in 1923. Miss Cooke wrote to several people whom she hoped might help her. These were John Middleton Murry, Mansfield's husband; Walter Lehman; Lesley Moore, Mansfield's friend and girlhood lover; and Dorothy Brett, artist and friend, who had gone to Taos in New Mexico in 1923 with D.H. Lawrence and Frieda Lawrence and who continued to live there. The ten letters (seven from Brett) received by Miss Cooke between 1929 and 1935 have never been published. By the time Brett died in 1977 she had a substantial reputation as an artist. She also had her own philosophy of life which she lived with integrity. She seems to have been a significant influence on the life of Kathleen Cooke, Jill Golden's mother.