'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.

This biography reveals Ottoline Morrell, London's leading literary hostess during the first three decades of the 20th century. Augustus John, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf and W.B. Yeats enjoyed her hospitality and she was Bertrand Russell's mistress for many years. To some she was a lover, to others a confidante and adviser. To many she was a mother substitute. A half-sister of the Duke of Portland and wife to a Liberal MP, she ran a celebrated salon before the First World War, swiftly emerging as a personality in her own right. Her influence was enormous: Huxley was one of many young writers who described her as having given him 'a complete mental re-orientation.' Miranda Seymour is the only Bloomsbury biographer to be allowed access to family papers which include Morrell's lost correspondence with Lytton Strachey and the revealing private records she kept from 1902 (the year of her marriage) to her death in 1938. This is also the first life of Morrell to have full benefit of Bertrand Russell's 2,500 letters to her. Fresh and often startling light is thrown not only on her passionate relationship with Russell and on her curious marriage to Philip Morrell, which survived against all odds, but also on the Bloomsberries, their snobbery, their malice and their deceit.

Many photographs of queer members of the Bloomsbury group.