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Summary
Summary
She was irresistible. She inspired fiction, fantasy, legend, and art.
Some say she was "the Bolter" of Nancy Mitford's novel The Pursuit of Love. She "played" Iris Storm in Michael Arlen's celebrated novel about fashionable London's lost generation, The Green Hat , and Greta Garbo played her in A Woman of Affairs, the movie made from Arlen's book. She was painted by Orpen; photographed by Beaton; she was the model for Molyneaux's slinky wraparound dresses that became the look fo the age--the Jazz Age.
Though not conventionally beautiful (she had a "shot-away chin"), Idina Sackville dazzled men and women alike, and made a habit of marrying whenever she fell in love--five husbands in all and lovers without number.
Hers was the age of bolters, and Idina was the most celebrated of them all.
Her father was the eighth Earl De La Warr. In a society that valued the antiquity of families and their money, hers was as old as a British family could be (eight hundred years earlier they had followed William the Conqueror from Normandy and been given enough land to live on forever . . . another ancestor, Lord De La Warr, rescued the starving Jamestown colonists in 1610, became governor of Virginia, and gave his name to the state of Delaware). Her mother's money came from "trade"; Idina's maternal grandfather had employed more men (85,000) than the British army and built one third of the world's railroads.
Idina's first husband was a dazzling cavalry officer, one of the youngest, richest, and best-looking of the available bachelors, with "two million in cash." They had a seven-story pied-à-terre on Connaught Place overlooking Marble Arch and Hyde Park, as well as three estates in Scotland. Idina had everything in place for a magnificent life, until the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand caused the newlyweds' world--the world they'd assumed would last forever--to collapse in less than a year.
Like Mitford's Bolter, young Idina Sackville left her husband and children. But in truth it was her husband who wrecked their marriage, making Idina more a boltee than a bolter. Soon she found a lover of her own--the first of many--and plunged into a Jazz Age haze of morphine. She became a full-blown flapper, driving about London in her Hispano-Suiza, and pusing the boundaries of behavior to the breaking point. British society amy have adored eccentrics whose differences celebrated the values they cherished, but it did not embrace those who upset the order of things. And in 1918, just after the Armistice was signed, Idina Sackville bolted from her life in England and, setting out with her second husband, headed for Mombasa, in search of new adventure.
Frances Osborne deftly tells the tale of her great-grandmother using Idina's never-before-seen letters; the diaries of Idina's first husband, Euan Wallace; and stories from family members. Osborne follows Idina from the champagne breakfasts and thé dansants of lost-generation England to the foothills of Kenya's Aberdare moutnains and the wild abandon of her role in Kenya's disintegration postwar upper-class life. A parade of lovers, a murdered husband, chaos everywhere--as her madcap world of excess darkened and crumbled around her.
Author Notes
Frances Osborne was born in London and studied philosophy and modern languages at Oxford University. She is the author of Lilla's Feast. Her articles have appeared in The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Independent, the Daily Mail, and Vogue. She lives in London with her husband, a Member of Parliament, and their two children.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Osborne's lively narrative brings Lady Idina Sackville (an inspiration for Nancy Mitford's character the Bolter) boldly to life, with a black lapdog named Satan at her side and a cigarette in her hand. Osborne (Lilla's Feast) portrays a desperately lonely woman who shocked Edwardian high society with relentless affairs and drug-fueled orgies. Idina's story unfolds in an intimate tone thanks to the author, her great-granddaughter, who only accidentally discovered the kinship in her youth with the media serialization of James Fox's White Mischief. Osborne makes generous use of sources and private family photos to add immediacy and depth to the portrait of a woman most often remembered as an amoral five-time divorcee: the author shows her hidden kindnesses at her carefully preserved Kenyan cattle ranch-a refuge from the later destructive Kenyan massacres. Still, Osborne unflinchingly exposes Idina's flaws-along with those of everyone else in the politely adulterous high society-while ably couching them in the context of the tumultuous times in which Idina resolved to find happiness in all the wrong places. The text, most lyrical when describing the landscapes around Idina's African residences, proves that an adventurous spirit continues to run in this fascinating family. 66 photos, (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
The story of Idina Sackville's life reads like an elaborately embroidered work of fiction. What makes this biography so compulsively readable, however, is the fact that it is all shockingly true. Osborne has painstakingly reconstructed the scandalous adventures of her great-grandmother, taking the reader along for the wild ride. As an Edwardian belle, one of the brightest of the Lost Generation's Bright Young Things, and a British expatriate living in the thick of colonial Kenya's notorious Happy Valley Set, Idina continually defied conventional expectations, marrying and divorcing five times, often leaving husbands, lovers, and children in her wake. Though there isn't much to admire about Sackville's serial infidelity and careless choices, this niche biography is enhanced by the novelistic scope and passion of a life lived against a cinematic-style backdrop.--Flanagan, Margaret Copyright 2009 Booklist
Guardian Review
The Bolter, dispassionately viewed by her daughter Fanny Logan, was a woman who felt herself "too beautiful and too gay to be burdened with a child at the age of 19" and, therefore, left. Subsequently, as the abandoned Fanny goes on to tell us in the opening pages of Nancy Mitford's best-known novel, her mother "ran away so often, and with so many different people, that she became known as the Bolter". The Pursuit of Love was published, to great acclaim, in 1945; the Bolter, along with Fanny's cousins, the Radletts, was thought to have been drawn, however vaguely, from life. (Nancy, according to her sister, Jessica, was too lacking in imagination to invent a character whenever she had an original to hand.) The Radlett children, together with their parents, were undoubtedly based on Mitford's own family. The Bolter's origins are less clear, but Frances Osborne's great-grandmother, the much-married Lady Idina Sackville, had surely crossed Mitford's mind. Just like the Bolter, Idina went to Kenya, married white hunters, and was connected to a horsewhipping scandal. (Her third and most promiscuous husband, Joss Hay, later Lord Erroll, was publicly flogged by one cuckolded spouse and murdered by another.) Again like the Bolter, Idina abandoned her young children, preferring romance to maternity. This desertion, in the eyes of her admiring descendant (Idina, Osborne tells us, is the woman she most wants to meet in an afterlife), is the one crime the author cannot forgive in a character who otherwise strikes her as glamorous, brave and magnificent. While anxious to show that she does not take the fault lightly - an unfortunate closing paragraph contrasts feckless Idina to virtuous Osborne, setting her completed biography aside to attend the needs of her little ones - she gives it insufficient weight. The evident truth (Idina only regained interest in her long-abandoned children when she had nothing better to occupy her time) is gracefully evaded. Osborne is an enthusiastic researcher. It isn't, yet, clear that she enjoys an equal talent for writing. The story of wild, beautiful, fearless Idina, heavily padded out with details of party decoration, station architecture, restaurant food, passenger lists, the world at war - and much else besides - is narrated as if Madame Bovary, rather than Flaubert, had got hands upon her own life-story. Language, here, is never allowed a rest; the result is tiring, and often baffling. Is an over-social Christmas best described as "unpleasantly effervescent"? Do oxen loom "like silent motor cars"? In what circumstances would "freshly picked" herbs be mingled with the "pungent, but compelling, smell of animal dung"? How best should we imagine "bedroom-blue eyes", a "wobbling sky", "geographical neighbours" or "a plunging neckline that fell in folds to the floor"? There is no doubting Osborne's goodwill towards her subject and her wish to deal with her in a sympathetic way. Here, too, however, the author's prose often achieves a contrary effect. Presenting Idina on her way to Kenya, aged 25 and with a second husband, Charles Gordon, Osborne tells us that her forebear was "as battle-scarred as the Europe she was trying to leave behind". Picky I may be, but Idina, at this point, has turned down the offer of reconciliation with her first and best-loved husband and has elected to leave her young sons behind in England. Isn't it a little excessive, in these circumstances, to compare her sufferings to those of a ravaged continent? The language of Idina and of her first husband, from whose unpublished diaries much of Osborne's copious social and military detail is drawn, presents a startling contrast to the hyperbole that animates, here, the narration of their every move. Idina, her voice preserved in a slender sheaf of letters, shares her grief with a widowed daughter-in-law in kindly, time-worn cliche: "Why is it in war the best are always taken? . . . only Time can soften the pain." Euan Wallace, the dead man's father, and author of the diaries, proves equally prosaic. "Desultory shopping," he writes during a visit with Idina to wartime Paris ("the whirl of Paris", in Osborne's febrile prose). Returned from punting at Maidenhead, Euan discloses that his friends "had a good bathe" and that "Idina and I went back by the 5.22 train." At a later date, he attends "a most excellent lecture on the strategical situation by the Duke of Northumberland". Whatever drove Idina and her first husband apart - and it is never, beyond a mutual hunger for sexual adventure, clear what the reasons were - their own unadorned language suggests that, behind all the swirling phrases of Osborne's rhetoric, we should be able to glimpse two solid, authentic personalities. We never do. The details that are offered, although rich and various, fail to paper over the absence of information that might have offered real insight. Comment might have been made upon Idina's decision to name her elaborately anglicised Kenyan home "Clouds": was she honouring some youthful memory of Clouds House, Wiltshire, one of the loveliest houses in England? Surely - to identify a more striking gap - once informed that Idina was "Kenyan queen of books", that she devoured a novel a day, and that Osborne owns photographs of the lady's "packed" bookshelves, we deserve more here than the lone revelation that Idina once read The Sea Eagle , a wartime story, set in Greece? Miranda Seymour's In My Father's House is published by Simon & Schuster. To order The Bolter for pounds 17.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop Caption: article-bolter.1 [Frances Osborne] is an enthusiastic researcher. It isn't, yet, clear that she enjoys an equal talent for writing. The story of wild, beautiful, fearless [Idina Sackville], heavily padded out with details of party decoration, station architecture, restaurant food, passenger lists, the world at war - and much else besides - is narrated as if Madame Bovary, rather than Flaubert, had got hands upon her own life-story. Language, here, is never allowed a rest; the result is tiring, and often baffling. Is an over-social Christmas best described as "unpleasantly effervescent"? Do oxen loom "like silent motor cars"? In what circumstances would "freshly picked" herbs be mingled with the "pungent, but compelling, smell of animal dung"? How best should we imagine "bedroom-blue eyes", a "wobbling sky", "geographical neighbours" or "a plunging neckline that fell in folds to the floor"? The language of Idina and of her first husband, from whose unpublished diaries much of Osborne's copious social and military detail is drawn, presents a startling contrast to the hyperbole that animates, here, the narration of their every move. Idina, her voice preserved in a slender sheaf of letters, shares her grief with a widowed daughter-in-law in kindly, time-worn cliche: "Why is it in war the best are always taken? . . . only Time can soften the pain." Euan Wallace, the dead man's father, and author of the diaries, proves equally prosaic. "Desultory shopping," he writes during a visit with Idina to wartime Paris ("the whirl of Paris", in Osborne's febrile prose). Returned from punting at Maidenhead, Euan discloses that his friends "had a good bathe" and that "Idina and I went back by the 5.22 train." At a later date, he attends "a most excellent lecture on the strategical situation by the Duke of Northumberland". - Miranda Seymour.
Kirkus Review
Sordid tales of aspiration and debauchery among the minor aristocracy of Britain. Osborne (Lilla's Feast: A Story of Food, Love, and War in the Orient, 2004) doesn't mean to malign her great-grandmother, the perpetrator of much bad behavior and the protagonist of this book. Indeed, by her account Idina Sackville earns points for not being a "husband stealer" and for being what one friend called "preposterouslyand secretlykind." Yet Idina, daughter of the philandering Earl De La Warr, took up with odd company early on. Her parents were unintended role models. Idina's mother, writes Osborne, married the earl to gain a title, and the earl, known as "Naughty Gilbert," married Idina's mother for her money. Eventually, Idina married rich, tooone of the richest men in Britain, in fact, "rich enough for his social ambitions to withstand marrying a girl from a scandalous family." She spent months designing a Xanadu featuring a "rabbit warren of dozens of nursery bedrooms and servants' rooms," but, alas, never got to see the pleasure dome completed, since the marriage turned out to be loveless and lost. Idina moved on, as she would four more times, ending up in British East Africa, where she made a hearty game of spouse-swapping and wound up figuring in stories that, among other things, would yield the aptly titled 1987 film White Mischief, as well as Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love (1945) and other period booksto say nothing of plenty of tabloid tales. Osborne, who writes pleasantly and carefully, hints that Idina was a pioneering feminist, but this portrait makes her appear to be self-absorbed and sad, living out a boozy, wandering and generally feckless life. Of interest to royal-watchers and certain strains of anglophiles, perhaps, but a sansculotte may wonder what the point is. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Lady Idina Sackville must be among the last of the titled and scandalous Brits of the post-World War I era whose lives have not yet been recorded in biography. Osborne, her great-granddaughter, has filled that small gap with this gossipy story, which takes its name from a sad minor character that novelist Nancy Mitford is said to have modeled on Idina in The Pursuit of Love. The Mitford connection is pretty much it for a claim to fame. In 1919 Idina deserted a fabulously wealthy husband and two toddlers to marry a lover and buy a farm in her beloved Kenya, where she turned up again (and usually built another house) with each of her subsequent three husbands. Osborne recounts with gusto the byzantine sexploits of Idina, her husbands, and their many houseguests. She claims that Idina also served as the model for the vamp heroine of Michael Arlen's sensational 1920s best seller The Green Hat. Verdict This is not a work of great depth; typical of the haphazard construction of the book, Osborne forgets to tell us if either Mitford or Arlen actually knew Idina. Still, those who enjoy stories (fiction or nonfiction) of the past's oversexed and idle rich (and there are lots of these readers) will love this book.-Stewart Desmond, New York City (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.