The Hostess with the Mostest

...Like Strachey, the novelist would pour out her admiration and affection to her hostess, only to turn and pillory her in diaries and epistles as a sex-mad harridan chasing terrified male guests—a patently false charge, for Ottoline's admirers and lovers complained that she too rarely dispensed her favors...

...The above is not from the stage directions for the next Merchant Ivory Edwardian blockbuster, nor for one of those spoofs where the illustrious figures of history, in the words of Max Beerbohm, pass before us "making remarks highly characteristic of themselves...

...Eliot watch his wife Vivien play croquet with England's Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith...

...Such meanness was not only treacherous...

...A short distance away, Virginia Woolf and T.S...

...All the while, the party's hostess strolls among her company...

...Thus it might be assumed that Miranda Seymour's Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale (Farrar Straus Giroux, 452 pp., $30) is merely one more biography of a minor Blooms-bury hanger-on...

...Katherine Mansfield sits reading in a lawn chair, trying to ignore the escalating marital quarrel between Frieda and D.H...

...But her parents' early deaths left Ottoline in an awkward predicament...

...As Stephen Spender acknowledged to the biographer, this sort of behavior was considered quite clever in Bloomsbury circles...

...Lady Ottoline Morrell impresses everyone who meets her with a beauty just this side of bizarre, and the leading British painters of the era flock to depict their sense of it...

...The chief object of his attentions, however, is Dora Carrington—who has eyes only for Lytton Strachey, entertaining an alfresco party of artists surrounding Vanessa Bell down below...

...He would spend months as a house guest, flattering his "plus chere des Marquises" and inviting his friends to her parties—all the time making fun of her behind her back...

...The problem was that Ottoline never felt at home in aristocratic society...

...While recuperating in Florence from that disastrous affair with an adventurer in his early forties, she encountered Bohemian culture in the expatriate circle of "Vernon Lee," a literary lesbian whose real name was Violet Paget...

...In acondolence letter to Philip Morrell after Ottoline's death, Henry Yorke (better known as the novelist Henry Green) extolled "the good she did to literally hundreds of young men like myself who were not worth her little finger, but she took trouble over them and they went out into the world very different from what they would have been if they had not known her...

...Late in life she found her greatest passion with a workman at Garsington, young enough to be her son, whom she called "Tiger...

...the deep-set turquoise eyes seem too haunted...

...It was there that she made a name entertaining the literary, artistic, intellectual, and political stars of her time...

...actually, it denoted his deeply unstable character...

...Her half-brother, Arthur, became the Sixth Duke of Portland, and she was a first cousin to the present Queen Mother...

...The most dislikable side of Virginia Woolf emerges in her letters from Garsington, where she claimed that "the drawl and crawl and smell" of Ottoline so permeated the atmosphere that "even the sky is done up in yellow silk and certainly the cabbages are scented...

...Rather, it is a composite picture of a fairly ordinary weekend during the heyday of Garsington Manor—the country estate belonging to Ottoline and her husband, Philip, the local Member of Parliament...

...She was soon deeply hurt to find that he felt no physical attraction to her, a fact she at first attributed to a disinterest in carnal relations—only to discover later that he routinely seduced chambermaids, kept secretaries as mistresses, and pestered Virginia Woolf with crude advances...

...it concealed the truth that Strachey, Woolf and any number of other writers and artists were deeply indebted to Ottoline's nurturing, connections and loyalty...

...If it is tempting to dismiss the significance of the preeminent hostess of an age, one need simply read the appreciative tributes of some who were launched by her efforts...

...Her mentors also urged a trip to Europe—where, at age 24, she discovered both art and ill-starred love...

...Against the backdrop of a sprawling Tudor manor, swarms of houseguests disport themselves...

...The castles in which she spent her childhood were filled with the "props of English history...

...Even before she discovered his infidelities, Ottoline sought her own solace in lovers...

...Under their tutelage Ottoline began to break away from family patterns, pursuing more intellectual interests...

...In addition to Russell, they included the artists Augustus John, Henry Lamb and Roger Fry...

...In spite of the great deal we learn about her background and behavior, she remains elusive...

...Mystical by nature, she found surrogate parents in a pair of religious leaders, the novelist George Mac-Donald and a domineering Anglican nun, Mother Julian of Truro...

...Still, Seymour fashions an entertaining, sympathetic portrait of a woman who believed her "life must break bounds set by the world," and of the Edwardian universe she inhabited...

...But one suspects that her most profound pleasure lay in entertaining: Her parties, besides serving to promote Philip's parliamentary career, gave full scope to her cultural tastes...

...Intriguing as her getup may be, her face is what truly captures the eye...

...Red high heels flash beneath the hem of her chrome yellow gown...

...Up on the roof, we glimpse the youthful Aldous Huxley trying to impress his companions, a bevy of "bright young things...

...Occasionally Seymour's thoroughness suffers lapses...

...Lawrence's cruel caricature of her in Women in Love, and as a figure of ridicule in numerous letters written by Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf and their friends...

...After the stuffy propriety of the Bentincks, Ottoline found all this most refreshing, and she was drawn (though not sexually) to the strong, unconforming older woman...

...Having little money of her own, she faced two unappealing, if traditional, options: She could either find herself a suitable husband, or she could settle down as an unobtrusive, helpful spinster in her brother's ducal household...

...The long Roman nose and prominent mouth reveal too much strength of character...

...On one occasion, "a jeweled dagger which had belonged to Henry VIII turned up in a cabinet drawer" she and her mother were exploring...

...They married within two years, but Seymour's account suggests that love was probably not the motivating factor for either...

...Maynard Keynes is holding forth on economics to Bertrand Russell—but the randy philosopher seems more interested in the vivacious, albeit vulgar, Mrs...

...Not all of her guests were ingrates...

...A friend of Henry James and Bernard Berenson, Lee cultivated a kind of fin de siecle chaste paganism, devoted to a Victorian reinterpretation of Greek and Renaissance ideals...

...the high, delicate cheekbones betray her blue blood...

...Yeats and Siegfried Sassoon, her arresting appearance steals the limelight...

...The biography succeeds in discrediting these cheap travesties, yet it fails to uncover Ottoline's underlying personality...

...Why, for instance, when her subject's commitment to religion is stressed throughout, are readers deprived of any information about that faith Was it Church of England, spiritualism, pantheism, or what?, Jong the same lines, we are repeatedly assured that Ottoline was Russell's full intellectual partner and philosophical confidante—even though the quotations given from love letters contain little more than mawkish endearments or quarrels about sex...

...Another time, they came across the pearl earrings Charles I had worn to his execution, as well as a portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots...

...True, the philosophically minded may recall that she was also Bertrand Russell's longtime mistress, but that tidbit has only reinforced an image of her as a ludicrous lion-huntress...

...In fact, though, it is something much more ambitious: an attempt to free its subject from the distorted slanders invented and spread by malicious "friends," and to portray a complex, rather heroically unconventional woman...

...Anxious for independence from her family, Ottoline also exhibited a savior complex that made Philip's expressed "need" for her compelling...

...Lawrence...

...Nevertheless, the couple remained fond of one another, and Ottoline seems to have lavished her maternal feelings on her wayward husband during his breakdowns...

...Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Bentinck was descended from one of England's leading aristocratic families...

...On her return to England, she began to establish her own personality by adopting a distinctive style of dress, seeking out creative people, and taking courses at Oxford...

...Others see her as a grande dame, somehow wandered out of an earlier century...

...Seymour brutally exposes the ingratitude and hypocrisy of many of the Morrells' more renowned visitors...

...Lytton Strachey comes off particularly badly...

...A slender six feet tall, swathed in trailing chiffon and brocade, she moves amid a jangle of necklaces and bracelets and an overpowering cloud of perfume...

...Obviously she exerted a strong magnetism on many intelligent and creative men, but we finish the book as bewildered about the nature and source of her charm as the Bloomsbury wits who invented fantastic explanations...

...Even flanked by W.B...

...she was less understanding with their daughter...

...No one can ever know the immeasurable good she did...

...Seymour provides entertaining descriptions of life at her villa, which featured menus of birds'-claw omelets and tongue stewed in chocolate...

...More recently, this most talented of English hostesses has been better known as Hermione Roddice, D.H...

...Eliot as she roquets the PM's ball away from a hoop...

...Some visitors liken her to a gypsy who has robbed a theater company's wardrobe...

...There she met Philip Morrell, a young solicitor about to enter politics...

...It cannot be called typically good-looking...