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Patricia Everett, a practicing psychologist and serious scholar, had been immersed in the study of the life and work of Mabel Dodge Luhan for many years when she came across a packet of letters from A. A. Brill to Luhan at Yale's Beinecke Library. Everett's first book (ten years in the making), A History of Having a Great Many Times Not Continued to Be Friends, documents the correspondence between Luhan and Gertrude Stein. In her introduction to the book under review here, Everett writes of her thrill in discovering the letters from Brill to Luhan: “For over fifteen years, I periodically transcribed and annotated the existing letters from Abraham Arden Brill to Mabel Dodge Luhan, archived in a formerly restricted file at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. I longed for Mabel's side of the correspondence, but resigned myself to Brill's daughter's assertions [that the letters had been destroyed]… . then, unexpectedly, in 2004, Mabel's letters to Brill, as well as eleven additional ones from Brill to her, were discovered among unsorted material during a recataloguing of the Luhan collection. A miraculous escape from the fire thus gave rise to this book of correspondence” (pp. xxiii-xxiv). By now the reader will have gathered the extent of Everett's passion for her subject, and her persistence.
Luhan was a woman of letters whose home in Taos, New Mexico, and apartment at 23 Fifth Avenue in New York became vital centers for those in the arts. Her New York salon was a gathering place for the literati and avant-garde, and the venue for her introduction to Brill and for Brill's introduction of psychoanalysis to America.1 The book contains all the correspondence between the two parties that is extant: forty-six letters from Mabel to Brill, and seventy-six from Brill to Mabel. The book presents not a mere transcription of the letters but a narrative organized around them, with passages providing background and context. As Everett writes, “It is a