Two Sisters

How does it happen that here in (relatively) remote and small Santa Fe, New Mexico, I’ve come to know about two sisters from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Lady Sylvia Brett (The Ranee of Sarawak) and her older sister, Lady Dorothy Brett, always known as Brett, painter who lived in Taos, New Mexico?

It’s serendipity, no doubt about it.

The two were linked for me a few days ago when a long-time friend, Helen MacCloud, sent me the embroidered silk coat, dark blue silk with embroidered bouquets and a yellow silk lining, that had belong to Sylvia, the Ranee in the dying days of British colonial power in India. Her husband, also British of course, was the Rajah, the last of the “White Rajahs.”

How did Helen come into possession of the coat? Years ago she became a close friend of Brett’s companion in Taos. Brett, not given to fancy coats, gave her this one, a gift from her sister Sylvia. And then it passed to Helen, and from Helen to a new friend here who carefully examined it for the smell of moth balls—there was none—pronounced it perfect, probably never worn, and passed it to me. It is so pretty and so fresh, seeming to recall the long ago romance of British power without its terrible taint.

Now it is hanging in my closet, reminding me of the very different paths these sisters chose while remaining close. Brett was the only one of D.H. Lawrence’s British friends to follow him to Taos where he hoped to create, with his wife Frieda, a utopian community in the mountains of New Mexico. All his other friends begged off, for obvious reasons, but Brett came. She wrote a compelling memoir of her time with D.H., riding horseback, chopping woods, attending sacred ceremonies at Taos Pueblo. Before long, when D.H. and Frieda moved on to Mexico, Brett stayed, becoming an accomplished painter and staying in New Mexico for the rest of her life.

Her sister Sylva took the other path, following her husband to India and reigning supreme there until the era ended with a crash and she went back to England to live the rest of her life as a member of the British peerage.

To me, this is a fascinating contrast, and one I hope to explore more deeply.

In New Mexico Taos D.H. Lawrence