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What is it about houses and the hauntings of earlier lives lived in them? There is a house that is nearly the protagonist of this marvelous novel. Freida's Cottage was central to Chestnut Lodge, a mental health complex in Rockville, Maryland. In 2021, it was added to the Register of National Historic Landmarks to memorialize Freida Fromm-Reichmann, one of the early women trained in psychoanalysis in Germany, who fled the Nazi terror of the 1930s, and who came to live and work there from 1935 to 1957, when she died. History and fiction are imagined to life in this novel of two women who inhabit different histories in this house. Eliza, a contemporary psychotherapist, moves into the Cottage in 2009. Ellen Prentiss Campbell's latest novel, Freida's Song, is a seductive narrative that interweaves the historic interior and professional life of Fromm-Reichmann, and the fictional life of Eliza, single mother and her adolescent son, who come to live in the same house decades later.
Both women are living out in their time in the Cottage the wounds and scars of loss and love, the passions for the patients they are trained to heal, and for the loved ones whom they do their utmost to help thrive. We move between two timelines smoothly, eager to discover how these two women will become interconnected in fiction, in a space and place that housed their lives in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Living nearby, Campbell knew Chestnut Lodge and its buildings, and became intrigued after a fire in 2009 destroyed all, but left the Cottage intact. Her work as a writer and a psychotherapist drew her into Fromm-Reichmann's history. As Campbell notes in an interview subsequent to the publication of Freida's Song, she believes that Fromm-Reichmann “believed loneliness was at the root of mental distress.” These combined arts that Campbell practices - writing and healing - gave her own imagination space to create the character of Eliza, her son, Nick, and his quest to know who his father was.
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