Rescuing misunderstood or neglected women is my passion as a biographer. Choosing them is a slow process; impossible to manufacture. For me, it has to be a true coup de foudre: an instant and overwhelming certainty – she’s the one! – that sweeps everything else out of the way.
Do I identify with my subjects? Absolutely. I’m not just talking about learning to drive a Bugatti (terrifying, when you’ve just been informed of the machine’s value, should you be unfortunate enough to dent it, but also hugely exhilarating) for The Bugatti Queen. What I mean by identification is recognising not just who these exceptional women were, but why they behaved as they did. Why, for example, did Jean Rhys drink? What made Ada Lovelace, schooled in discretion by a nervous mother, grow so reckless about compromising her reputation? Why did Ottoline, a shy woman, dress to draw attention to herself?
A question that often emerges at book events is whether I’ve learned anything from the women I write about. (Bit of an edge there, you think? So do I.) The answer is a resounding yes. Be brave. Have faith in yourself. Never let the bastards get you down. In so far as it’s possible, keep your temper under control. And be kind. Or, as Henry James made a point of reiterating: Be kind. Be kind. Be kind. Which, for most of the time – although H G Wells might not have agreed after being taken to task for infelicitous writing – H J undeniably was.
Nudity was part of the order of the day for bohemian wartime summers in Ottoline’s laid-back refuge
Ottoline Morrell, mocked in her lifetime and vilified after her death, has been my touchstone on all these little maxims for more than 30 years. I thought when I first started reading about her – and I still think today – that courage was her greatest quality. It wasn’t easy to be brave, given a voice that inspired both mirth and mimicry, and a face that was sometimes compared to that of a horse. As Ottoline herself said: “It is indeed a damnably difficult thing to live fully, richly, gorgeously and yet courageously.” To do so with modest funds, with a known philanderer for a husband, and in painful awareness that you are publicly mocked as ridiculous by the very people you most admire is a very tall order indeed. But Ottoline pulled it off – and I love her for it.
If I had to pluck out a favourite among her many bons mots, I’d go for this one: “Conventionality is deadness.” She wrote that bold and splendid statement in the small journals – her handwriting resembles the hectic tarantella of a spider in its death throes – which were kept private from everybody except her husband. But when exactly did she decide to stake her life on this belief? The biography I wrote of her in 1993 is republished, updated, this summer – and I’m still uncertain about the answer.
A fair guess might be that Ottoline’s scorn for playing by the rules began shortly before she took the daring decision to break free from the carefully regulated and socially graded world to which, as the half-sister of one of England’s richest men, the Duke of Portland, Ottoline Cavendish-Bentinck belonged. Brought up in a pious and modest environment, with lots of prayers – her Irish mother was close to the local vicar, Charles Kingsley, author of (does anybody still read it?) The Water-Babies – Ottoline never reconciled herself to the family’s sudden change of gear. It took place in 1879 when her half-brother became the Duke and the Bentincks moved up north, to the terribly grand and – until Ottoline’s mother set to work – almost uninhabitable home of a reclusive relative. Ottoline, just six years old, disliked Welbeck Abbey then and she never changed her mind. A home constituting some 400 rooms may not have been exactly conventional but, even when crowded with aristocratic guests, it was undeniably dead.
A grateful T S Eliot had written the third part of The Waste Land at a clinic in Lausanne recommended to him by Ottoline
Long before – shock and horror – she decided to marry Philip Morrell, the handsome and somewhat spineless son of a solicitor, from an Oxfordshire family of brewers that made its money in Morrells beer, Ottoline decided to quit playing the thankless role of a grand lady. By 1902, when she married Philip in a staggeringly elaborate and pinch-waisted wedding dress paid for by the doting Duke, high-minded Ottoline had done courses in logic, Roman history and political economy at St Andrew’s and Somerville, no less, while taking private history coaching sessions with H H Asquith in return for an occasional knee squeeze and maybe something more by her lecherous tutor. Along the way, Ottoline had found religion at a Cornish convent and true love (rather unsatisfactorily returned) with another lecher, Axel Munthe, while visiting Capri with a suspicious and increasingly jealous girlfriend.
Hilda Rootes’s jealousy prompts another question. When Charlie Porter, the fashion journalist, wrote a book to go with his lively 2023 fashion homage to Bloomsbury, Bring No Clothes, he suggested that Ottoline might have been queer. Sure, she had passionate affairs with Henry Lamb, Augustus John, Roger Fry and Bertrand Russell, but still, where there’s a hint, there surely lies a story? Sharp-eyed Porter had noticed an account of Ottoline and Virginia Woolf “falling into each other’s arms” at a party. He put it together with a photo that Ottoline had taken of Dora Carrington posing naked as a statue, in her garden, and another, possibly taken by Carrington on the same occasion, of a recumbent Ottoline, also naked.
Clear evidence that Ottoline fancied women? I doubt it. Nudity was part of the order of the day for bohemian wartime summers in Ottoline’s laid-back refuge for writers, artists, cousins and oddballs, all thrown together at Garsington Manor in a way that provoked more gossip than the poor hostess could ever, in her innocence, have imagined. But yes, to give Porter his due, there’s no doubt that Ottoline did enjoy intense relationships with women she admired. As to sex, I’ve never been convinced that she enjoyed it at all until . . . but that’s for a later paragraph.
Conventionality is deadness. What other attitude can you take if you’re blessed – or cursed – with an appearance that makes you the object of astonished stares, however unobtrusively you dress? Ottoline’s looks – long nose, long jaw, blazing turquoise eyes, bright auburn hair – were bizarre, as was her low, swoopingly melodious voice and the height she exaggerated by wearing two-inch elevator wedges inside her shoes. As to her dress style (“a definite rather bad taste” in the supercilious view of Vanessa Bell, a woman who never did see the point of Ottoline Morrell), it was beyond extraordinary.
The costumes put on show in Porter’s imaginative fashion parade failed – bar a marvellous pair of bright Russian boots in multicoloured leather – to do justice to the splendid oddity of Ottoline’s appearance. Copied from paintings she had seen at Welbeck and on her travels, her dresses were showstoppers, more suited to the stage than a quiet supper with, say, T S Eliot and Siegfried Sassoon. Stephen Spender got a bit carried away when recalling his vision of her as a shepherdess, complete with crook, bonnet and a pack of pugs standing in for sheep. But only a bit. One young man, seeing a smiling hostess advancing towards him with a buzzing horde of midges trapped in the net layers of her massive skirts, turned tail and fled. And Sassoon never forgot his initial startled view of ballooning pink harem pants as Ottoline made her descent from the dovecote-studio of one of her guests.
“I hate the safe and coward way”: another of Ottoline’s secret mantras. It hurt her deeply to learn, while still living at Garsington, that she was an object of ridicule in Bloomsbury’s inner circle. But many friends (Yeats, Sassoon, Eliot, Russell and even, eventually, D H Lawrence, one of her harshest critics in fiction) did see through the facade that Ottoline erected with unfaltering panache as a disguise for the rather saintly woman – her chief faults were a gently malicious love of gossip and an unquenchable hunger for friendship – who finally, in 1921, found sexual happiness. David Cecil observed that the Morrells, if asked to choose between a new bath and a garden statue, would always choose the latter. Lionel Gomme (“Tiger” in Ottoline’s journal) arrived at Garsington in 1920 to make plinths for some of those statues. By 1921, Ottoline and the young stonemason, a village boy, were a couple. “I used to call for a lover and now God has sent him,” she wrote.
In 1922, during a weekend when an oblivious Virginia Woolf was visiting Garsington, Ottoline’s young lover died in her arms of a heart attack. Courageous as always, she carried on with the entertainment. Safely restored to Hogarth House, Woolf wrote in one of her most blithely treacherous asides of the relief of being able to take a bath.
One year earlier, a grateful T S Eliot had written the third part of The Waste Land at a clinic in Lausanne recommended to him by Ottoline. (He actually wrote it in the room that a distraught Ottoline had previously occupied.) During the weekend that Lionel Gomme died, Ottoline persuaded Virginia Woolf to help start a fund to enable Eliot, still employed by a bank, to focus on his writing. Both Eliot and his first wife, Vivienne, liked Ottoline from the start. Ottoline remained one of Vivienne’s most loyal friends, even after being accused by her of sleeping with Eliot.
Long before Ottoline’s death of an ill-judged overdose by her doctor in 1938, Virginia Woolf had come to share the Eliots’ view of her. I wish their splendid friend could have lived to see the epitaph of her that Woolf and Eliot jointly submitted to Philip Morrell.
A brave spirit, unbroken
Delighting in beauty and goodness
And the love of her friends.
Possibly out of pique – Virginia had unsurprisingly declined a proposal of his own (Philip Morrell wanted to go to bed with the woman who so adored his wife) – or perhaps just vanity, Ottoline’s weak, philandering husband turned down Eliot and Woolf’s lovely lines in favour of a few words by a man who really knew how to write: himself.
Miranda Seymour is a biographer, novelist, critic, academic, author of award-winning memoir “In My Father’s House” and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the RSA. Her latest book, “I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys”, is published by William Collins
