The family lived near Windsor and had homes in London and at Callander in Perthshire, Scotland, where Dorothy spent days fishing in the River Teith and nearby Loch Lubnaig.

[1] Dorothy recounted in later life that a friend of her father attempted to sexually assault her when aged about 14–15, an experience to which she attributed her later fear and distrust of men.

Along with other female art students, especially Dora Carrington and Barbara Hiles, she had her hair cut short (for the time) in a style that led Virginia Woolf to call them 'cropheads'.

Through fellow student Mark Gertler, she met Lady Ottoline Morrell and began mixing in an artistic and literary circle that included Clive Bell, Bertrand Russell, D. H. Lawrence,[4] Virginia Woolf, Augustus John, Aldous Huxley, Gilbert Cannan, and George Bernard Shaw.

During this period, Dorothy became severely deaf, causing difficulty in communication that lasted the rest of her life; she used an ear trumpet and, later, hearing aids.

[6] After visiting Taos for the first time in 1923 at the invitation of Mabel Dodge Luhan and then returning to London, D. H. Lawrence held a dinner party at the Cafe Royal (which he called "The Last Supper").

There he tried to recruit friends to move to Taos in order "to create a utopian society he called 'Rananim'",[7] an idea he had first proposed in a letter of 3 January 1915.

There she lived in poverty for several years, in one case obliged to share an outhouse in winter with neighbor and author Frank Waters.

This short work describes the tumultuous relationship of D. H. Lawrence, his wife Frieda, Dorothy Brett and Mabel Dodge Sterne Luhan, a wealthy patron of the arts.

[20] Penelope Keith portrayed Brett in the 1981 film Priest of Love, which told the story of Lawrence's last years in New Mexico.