A view of Luhan from the psychiatrist’s couch

Lois Palken Rudnick had to wait until 2000 to read the 20,000 pages of memoirs of the late wealthy art patron Mabel Dodge Luhan.

That’s because Luhan’s family had placed an embargo on a large segment of memoirs of the woman who is famously associated with the origins of the Taos literary colony in the early part of the 20th century.

Rudnick, who is Luhan’s biographer, was interested in Luhan’s letters that revealed her decades-long relationship with her Freudian psychiatrist and about her mental illness.

	“The Suppressed Memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan – Sex, Syphilis and Psychoanalysis in the Making of Modern American Culture” edited by Lois Palken Rudnick UNM Press, $34.95, 238 pp.

“That’s what I was interested in, the dynamics of that relationship,” said Rudnick, a Santa Fe resident.

“I began to understand the male-female dynamics in the Victorian era. … The story was funny, horrific and established a pattern that helped me see how she had been trying to be a proper woman and a modern woman, and how free love would bring her happiness, which it never did.”

She doesn’t think that Luhan ever came to terms with that fundamental proper woman-modern woman conflict in her life.

Each of the suppressed memoirs that Rudnick chose to edit and publish “has a sort of undercurrent – Mabel’s lifelong inability to come to terms with her sexuality and what sexuality meant for women of her time. She gave up her bisexuality in her 30s, as far as I can tell,” she said.

Luhan was born in 1879 in Buffalo, N.Y.

Rudnick said that Victorians and Freudian psychiatrists share the belief that the normal woman is one who is married to a man.

Heading into her research of these memoirs, Rudnick said she had known that Luhan had syphilis but not much more about it. That led the biographer on a quest to learn about the social and cultural ramifications of the venereal disease, including its impact on the women’s rights movement in the late 19th century.

“So I think that there are real-life lessons in the book. The story is so powerful and filled with extreme forms of conflict that many women live with today,” Rudnick said.

She said she lectured earlier this summer to 450 psychiatrists and therapists at a creativity and madness conference in Santa Fe.

Rudnick said the publication of the suppressed memoirs follows her biography “Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds” and her book “Utopian Vistas: The Mabel Dodge Luhan House and the American Counterculture.”

Rudnick also edited Luhan’s earlier unsuppressed memoirs, which were released in 1999; Sunstone Press has reissued those memoirs.

Lois Rudnick discusses, signs “The Suppressed Memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan” at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 28, at Bookworks, 4022 Rio Grande NW, and at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 4, at Collected Works, 202 Galisteo, Santa Fe.