Lady ottoline morrell biography

Primary Sources

(1) Virginia Woolf, Old Bloomsbury (c. )

When indeed one remembers that drawing room full of people, the pale yellows and pinks of the brocades, the Italian chairs, the Persian rugs, the embroideries, the tassels, the scent, the pomegranates, the pugs, the pot-pourri and Ottoline bearing down upon one from afar in her white shawl with the great scarlet flowers on it and sweeping one away out of the large room and the crowd into a little room with her alone, where she plied one with questions that were so intimate and so intense I think my excitement may be excused.

(2) Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf()

In , Ottoline seemed to her a "fancy-dress" character, an alluring, ridiculous phenomenon. Lady Ottoline, then thirty-six, was unhappily married to Philip Morrell, a Liberal MP. She had a three-year-old daughter, Julian (the survivor of twins), and since she had been turning herself into a famous hostess for writers and artists at 4

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Ottoline: The Life of Lady Ottoline Morrell

May 14,

If you like historical skvaller, you will love this book! Lady Ottoline Morrell was a kind of spiritual den mother to some interesting characters. 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 people, ranging from politicians like Prime Minister Asquith, Winston Churchill, and Ramsay MacDonald to Bohemian artists like Augustus John. 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, Bertrand Russell, and many others. Just about anybody who was anybody in the arts was invite

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Lady Ottoline Morrell

 

A century and eight years ago, an aristocrat and her middle class husband moved into number 44 Bedford Square. A century and six years later, an admirer of this aristocrat founded a college (NCH) in her house’s mirror image on the square’s Northern side, and named its academic salon after her.

 

What had she done to deserve this honour?

 

Lady Ottoline Morrell was what modern jargon would call a facilitator, and the Edwardians called a patroness. In Bedford Square, and at her country house in Oxfordshire, she hosted artists of many kinds &#; introducing them to each other, giving them presents, and offering her friendship. They included Henry James, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Augustus John, Dorothy Brett, G.E. Moore, John Singer Sergeant, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Jacob Epstein, Walter Sickert, Lytton Strachey, Mark Gertler, Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, Dora Carrington, Bertrand Russell, D.H. Lawrence, Duncan Grant, W.B. Yeats, L.P.