Sandra Jobson Darroch

If you like gossip, you will love this book! Lady Ottoline Morrell was a kind of spiritual den mother to some fascinating people. Being married to a Member of Parliament was insufficient to satisfy her hunger for intellectual and emotional stimulation. Her salons in London, and later at her estate near Oxford, attracted a potpourri of outrageous characters, ranging from politicians like Prime Minister Asquith, Winston Churchill, and Ramsay MacDonald to Bohemian artists like Augustus John. show more Her friends and guests included D. H. Lawrence, Siegfried Sassoon, John Singer Sargent, E. M. Forster, Nijinsky and Diaghilev, John Maynard Keynes, Arnold Bennett, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, even Charley Chaplin.

Biographer Lytton Strachey was a regular, as were Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, and Bertrand Russell. Just about anybody who was anybody in the arts was invited to drop by on Thursdays for tea. She knew them all. She had affairs with some of them, made matches for some, and showed up in the novels of a few. It makes for a fascinating read. show less

Hard to tell the difference between this biography and the Seymour biography...this one is somewhat more surface and some guessing and gossip. It was the first full biography and has many wonderful photos. It is a sympathetic portrait of an amazing, eccentric, energetic, legendary, bizarre, and sensitive woman who was the target of feuds and betrayals and much mocking by people she thought were her friends but she never gave up and she continued to help those in British arts and letters.

Hard to tell the difference between this biography and the Seymour biography...this one is somewhat more surface and some guessing and gossip. It was the first full biography and has many wonderful photos. It is a sympathetic portrait of an amazing, eccentric, energetic, legendary, bizarre, and sensitive woman who was the target of feuds and betrayals and much mocking by people she thought were her friends but she never gave up and she continued to help those in British arts and letters.

I read the original version of this book years ago and found Ottoline a most fascinating character. She knew everyone who was anyone and helped many artists, poets, writers find their feet and made it possible for them to produce and become who they became. She financed many and supported others. She was caricatured in books and painting and poetry by those she had helped and figured hugely in many books that went on to become best sellers. Many now might not know that the character they show more found so interesting in, for example, D.H.Lawrence's Women in Love or Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow, was based on a real person. Lady Ottoline Morrell was an original. Few people are. show less