'A kind of blissography, teeming with bon mots' Sunday Times A celebrated modern classic that has revolutionised our understanding of the Bloomsbury group and remains the definitive biography of the group's gloriously eccentric patron, Lady Ottoline Morrell. Met with widespread acclaim and translated into fifteen languages, this seminal book provoked a rethinking of the traditional Bloomsbury narrative and the rewriting of some major biographies. For decades, Ottoline Morrell was grossly misunderstood. The artists and writers who benefited from her generous patronage and friendship helped to create the false and vicious image of a nymphomanical aristocrat with cultural aspirations. This landmark literary biography presents Morrell in an entirely new light, rightly setting her centre-stage as the brilliant and courageous lynchpin of the Bloomsbury group. She counted T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey, Siegfried Sassoon, Augustus John, Katherine Mansfield and W.B. Yeats among her closest friends and houseguests. A legendary and agonisingly protracted love-affair with Bertrand Russell never undermined this unlikely couple's deep and understanding friendship. Ottoline's loyalty to her own promiscuous husband survived public humiliation and private crises. Overhauling the long-held conventional view of Morrell as a victim, a creature of her class who was born to be exploited and derided by her wittier friends, Seymour repaints the world of the Bloomsberries and rescues the grand life of Ottoline Morrell from the depths of historical obscurity.

Lady Ottoline Morrell was the foremost host of the Bloomsbury set, offering sustenance and friendship to Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, Duncan Grant and her lover Bertrand Russell, to name but a few. This book is a revised and updated edition of the author's original biography of Ottoline first published in 1975 worldwide. It has been updated, with vignettes about her sources, including lunch at ?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" / Charleston with Duncan Grant, and a ship's tumbler of sherry with David Garnett as a prelude to discussing "skeletons in Ottoline's cupboard"). Her sources in Texas where she read more than 8,000 letters to Ottoline including 2,500 letters from Bertrand Russell, can now be located in new footnotes. Darroch remains as impressed as ever by Ottoline's courage and determination to forgo the comfortable life of an aristocrat to mix with – and champion – some of the 20th century's leading artists and writers. The definitive biography.