Ettie: The Intimate Life And Dauntless Spirit Of Lady Desborough
The Age
Saturday November 15, 2008
Ettie: The Intimate Life and Dauntless Spirit of Lady Desborough
Richard Davenport-Hines Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $65LADY Desborough, as one wit observed of poet Stephen Spender, was not so much famous as she knew a lot of famous people. She was born into wealth and upper-class privilege in 1867 (related to the Duke of Wellington, no less) and married into upper-class privilege. Richard Davenport-Hines portrays her, more or less, as redolent of a now-vanished England, the archetypal Edwardian lady who lived through Victoria's reign and on into postwar, welfare-state Britain. An indomitable spirit who was orphaned in childhood and lost two sons in World War I, a famous flirt (who never went "all the way") and a salon hostess who dined in the highest political circles (Churchill, a life-long friend, Chamberlain, et al) and moved in pretty elevated literary circles including Wells, Kipling, Yeats, Sassoon and Wilde (whose plays she could well be a character from), she certainly led a "large" life. Its value, I suppose, is in being a keyhole to the times.
© 2008 The Age
