Henry James wrote of the Brontë sisters:
The romantic tradition of the Brontës, with posterity, has been still
more essentially helped, I think, by a force independent of any one
of their applied faculties—by the attendant image of their dreary,
their tragic history, their loneliness and poverty of life.
The personal position of the three sisters, in short, had become the
very tone of their united production.
In somewhat the same fashion the privileged position of Iris Origo
(1902–1988) has become a part of her literary work. It is as rare as
it is wonderful to see a person, born and bred with every
advantage—educational, personal, financial,
and social—use each
advantage to its fullest capacity. Origo was like the man in the
parable who turned his five talents into ten.
She was the only child of Bayard Cutting, a sensitive and
intellectual American millionaire, who died young of tuberculosis
(her one disadvantage) and left her a fortune. The Cuttings were old
New York, but, unlike the denizens of Edith Wharton’s age of
innocence, they were a family of cultivation and artistic tastes.
Origo’s grandmother, Olivia Murray Cutting, in her extreme old age,
told the writer of this piece, then young, of a summer in the White
Mountains in 1865 when she had wanted to go for a hike with three
young men who were visiting her family. Her father protested that
they didn’t want the company of a little girl, but one of them
insisted: