Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale - Softcover

Seymour, Miranda

Softcover

ISBN 10: 057124310X ISBN 13: 9780571243105

Publisher: Faber and Faber, 2009

Synopsis

This biography reveals Ottoline Morrell, London's leading literary hostess during the first three decades of the 20th century. Augustus John, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf and W.B. Yeats enjoyed her hospitality and she was Bertrand Russell's mistress for many years. To some she was a lover, to others a confidante and adviser. To many she was a mother substitute. A half-sister of the Duke of Portland and wife to a Liberal MP, she ran a celebrated salon before the First World War, swiftly emerging as a personality in her own right. Her influence was enormous: Huxley was one of many young writers who described her as having given him 'a complete mental re-orientation.' Miranda Seymour is the only Bloomsbury biographer to be allowed access to family papers which include Morrell's lost correspondence with Lytton Strachey and the revealing private records she kept from 1902 (the year of her marriage) to her death in 1938. This is also the first life of Morrell to have full benefit of Bertrand Russell's 2,500 letters to her. Fresh and often startling light is thrown not only on her passionate relationship with Russell and on her curious marriage to Philip Morrell, which survived against all odds, but also on the Bloomsberries, their snobbery, their malice and their deceit.

About this title

About the Author:

Miranda Seymour, celebrated both as a novelist and a biographer, has been a visiting professor at Nottingham Trent University, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She is the author of five acclaimed biographies: A Ring Of Conspirators, an innovative study of Henry James and his literary circle; Ottoline Morrell: Life On A Grand Scale; Robert Graves: Life On The Edge; Mary Shelley; and The Bugatti Queen. Her most recent book is a memoir of her father, In My Father's House, published in the UK in 2007. Miranda is also the author of several successful historical novels, including, most recently, The Telling.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Ottoline Morrell (1873-1938), benefactor to and social catalyst of the Bloomsbury Group, has found in Seymour (Ring of Conspirators, 1989, etc.) a sharp eye and fine sense of irony to tell, for the first time, her side of the story (her memoirs, which appeared shortly after her death, were edited by her husband)--and it's an amazing one, including nearly every artist and writer in early 20th-century England. With a title, a small inheritance, but little education, talent, or even good health, Ottoline married Philip Morrell, who became an MP. Through a devoted but asexual marriage that survived their many infidelities, the two created the most famous salon in modern England, first in London and then on the great country estate of Garsington, outside of Oxford. There, between the wars, among exotic birds and flowers, Bertrand Russell, D.H. and Frieda Lawrence, Eliot, Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, Katherine Mansfield, Aldous Huxley, E.M. Forster, Graham Greene, Walter de la Mare, Oxford undergraduates, and a clutch of painters and dilletantes enjoyed their freedom, Morrell's hospitality and admiration, and the ``spirit of active benevolence'' in which she sheltered, fed, amused, comforted, and loved this unruly crowd--who repaid her with scurrilous letters, betraying her even as they used her. Over six feet tall with red hair and a taste for wearing bizarre costumes, Morrell was an easy mark for parody, but as Lawrence--who in Women in Love offered the most painful one--said, she ``moved men's imaginations.'' And her range was encompassing: She could enjoy a Henry James or Joseph Conrad, a Wittgenstein or the young stonemason with whom, late in life, she had her first successful sexual experience after a lifelong romance with Bertrand Russell. Social history at its best. Ottoline confided that ``life on a grand scale'' was ``damnably difficult''--and Seymour has captured that life splendidly. (Photographs) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber and Faber
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 057124310X
• ISBN 13: 9780571243105
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 616