Ellen Prentiss Campbell is the author of the novel The Bowl with Gold Seams (2016, winner of the Indie Excellence Award for Historical Fiction) and the short story collections Known By Heart (2020) and Contents Under Pressure (2016, nominated for the National Book Award). Her short fiction has been featured in numerous journals including The Massachusetts Review and The MacGuffin. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, her essays and reviews appear in The Fiction Writers Review, where she is a contributing editor, the Washington Independent Review of Books, The New York Journal of Books, and others.
Frieda’s Song, a work of historical fiction, is inspired by the life of renowned psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. Fleeing Nazi Germany in 1935, she came to the Chestnut Lodge Sanatorium in Rockville, Maryland. She practiced there for the rest of her life, establishing the Lodge’s reputation for innovative treatment of mental illness. Fromm-Reichmann lived next door to the hospital in her custom-built home, Frieda’s Cottage, dying there under mysterious circumstances in 1957. The Lodge closed in 2001; several years later fire destroyed the abandoned hospital building. Frieda’s Cottage survived. Campbell explores the dual mysteries of Frieda’s death and the destruction of the Lodge. The novel spans seventy years and is told by Frieda; current-day psychotherapist Eliza Kline; and Eliza’s teenage son Nick. The story explores the tension between love and work, the strength and limits of relationship, and what healers must do to heal themselves. Rich in detail of time and place, Frieda’s Song is dramatic tale of the way history and chance, and the work and people we love, shape our lives—and how the past is always present, haunting us.
Ellen is a graduate of The Bennington Writing Seminars, Simmons School of Social Work, and Smith College. She has studied and offered workshops and readings at The Bethesda Writers Center. She lives in Washington D.C. with her husband, and summers in Manns Choice, Pennsylvania.
Frieda’s Song is now available for purchase at your favorite bookseller as well as Apprentice house Press’ website.
You can find out more information about Ellen on her website: https://ellencampbell.net/
