Description: Perhaps no other figure has inspired more portraits and parodies in modern English literature than Lady Ottoline Morrell. The inspiration for Hermione Roddice in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love, Priscilla Wimbush in Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow, and Lady Caroline Bury in Graham Greene's It's a Battlefield, Ottoline Morrell was one of the most famous - and infamous - personalities of the Bloomsbury era. Confidante to Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, friend to D. H. Lawrence and Siegfried Sassoon, and lover of Augustus John and Bertrand Russell, she was renowned - like Gertrude Stein in Paris - for her literary salon and her support of writers, artists, conscientious objectors, and hangers-on. She was also pilloried for her flamboyant dress, her dilettantism, and her deeply religious beliefs. In Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale, Miranda Seymour restores Ottoline Morrell's leading role in the Bloomsbury circle. Based on complete access to the Morrell family archives and to the Bertrand Russell correspondence, it throws fresh and often startling light on her tumultuous affairs and on her curious - yet enduring - marriage to Philip Morrell. An unveiled look at Bloomsbury - its petty intrigues and shifting alliances, its venomous backbiting and fervent dalliances - Ottoline Morrell is an elegant, lively portrait of British literary society and the definitive biography of one of the era's most celebrated patrons of the arts.

Please Wait