Miranda Seymour has given us an admirably straightforward life of the most famous blue-blooded bohemian of them all. Seymour is gradually able, through the accretion of much detail, to make a whole person out of the contradictory Lady Ottoline Morrell. Seymour’s subject was, on the one hand, a fervent Christian and lifelong teetotaler, and, on the other hand, an avant-garde aesthete and adultress who often shirked her duties as a mother.
One thing that ties the Victorian and wild Romantic strains together is that Lady Ottoline seldom enjoyed sex with the succession of men she admitted to her bed. She was seeking a high-minded intellectual and spiritual union, and beaux like the priapic Bertrand Russell were kept on what was, for them, practically starvation rations.
Lady Ottoline was the half-Irish half-sister of a duke, and in her veins flowed the blood of the Hapsburgs. This interesting lineage produced a tall, rebellious, red-headed beauty who would show up at the Asquiths’ wearing “a feathered turban and green silk trousers to show off her uncommonly long legs.” An open-hearted sympathizer with scruffy painters, poets, war refugees, and other misfits, Lady Ottoline generously encouraged—and was later mocked by—the likes of Lytton Strachey, Henry Lamb, D. H. Lawrence, and Aldous Huxley.
Certain aspects of her life, however, cannot but strike the reader as silly.
The biographer is at pains to show that this well-read and intelligent patroness did not deserve to be lampooned as Lawrence’s Hermione Roddice (Women
