The central flame of one’s personality has to be alone,’ wrote Lady Ottoline Morrell, ‘but the outer pearls of this flame can touch others and radiate out into life and art.’
In 1919, Welsh artist Augustus John painted a dramatically lit portrait of Lady Ottoline, in which she wears a white pearl necklace, a deep green velvet dress and a huge black hat. From beneath its brim, she peers out formidably, her head held upright and blue-green eyes glancing sideways; abundant auburn hair, cut to her strong jawline, frames her thin, aristocratically angular face.
John’s remarkable portrait pays tribute to an extraordinary woman. At six foot tall, Lady Ottoline was an imposing figure, who exaggerated her stature by wearing high-heeled shoes, extravagant hats and colourful silk gowns. A rich heiress with a love of art and literature, she fashioned herself as an enthralling muse for artists, inspiring over five hundred portraits. Yet in none of these artworks is she ever smiling, and there is a significant reason why.
Much of Lady Ottoline’s life was spent in her sprawling manor home in Oxfordshire: Garsington. Here, she and her husband Philip Morrell, a Liberal MP, invited artists, writers, intellectuals and philosophers to join them for dinners, drinks on their terrace and dancing in the garden, which was filled with sunflowers, marigolds, lavender and roses. Writing in her journal, Lady Ottoline described Garsington in romantic terms, as ‘a far-away castle on a hill’. Much of what unfolded within its walls was enchanting, although – and like any good fairy tale – there was also a darker side to the mistress of this mansion.
The Morrells left London for Garsington in 1915, which was partly a reaction to the outbreak of the First World War. For Lady Ottoline, who was a pacifist, it was important that she live ‘away from London, the horror of the War’. In 1916, military service was announced as compulsory for all single British men, and those who objected to the war and thus refused to fight earned the formal status of conscientious objectors. Seen to have rejected conventional British society and everything it stood for, this small minority was required to work as labourers. The heiress recalled in her journal the community of creatives, a good number of whom were conscientious objectors, whom she welcomed: ‘We have had many, many people here. It seems to me crowds come and go, the house full every week-end, and overflowing… In July Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant came and Lytton Strachey, who stayed on some time and indeed has spent most of this summer here.’ At Garsington she created a haven for these like-minded people to ‘meet and think and talk freely’, while providing employment on their estate’s farm to those objectors who would otherwise have been prosecuted.
Among Lady Ottoline’s guests were members of the notorious Bloomsbury Group, a collective of English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists, which formed at the start of the twentieth century. The name was born from their weekly meetings at Vanessa Bell’s London home, which she shared with her sister, Virginia Woolf. At their gatherings, the group discussed a range of topics, stemming from their shared interest in literature, a commitment to the arts, liberal political views and an anti-war stance – Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey and David Garnett were among those who became conscientious objectors. The members were also united in their rejection of strict Victorian ideals; instead, they embraced a culture of sexual freedom. Today, the group are just as well-known for their interwoven love lives and multiple affairs as they are for making art or writing novels.
It’s not surprising that Lady Ottoline – a woman who in her own words aspired to live ‘on the same plane as poetry and as music’ – was entranced by the Bloomsbury Group. While living in London, she took tea with Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf at their home; in her own words, she was ‘dazzled’ by them. Similarly, Woolf was impressed by Lady Ottoline, and later confessed that their relationship was like ‘sitting under a huge lily, absorbing pollen like a seduced bee’.
Lady Ottoline welcomed the Bloomsbury bohemians to dinners and soirées at Garsington. In her memoirs, Lady Ottoline remembered specific evenings, including a memorable ‘hot moonlit night, when we all went into the garden and some of the young people, who were staying, amongst them Duncan Grant, Bunny Garnett, Carrington and Gertler, were dressed up in fancy clothes, of which I had a store, and danced a wild and lovely ballet on the lawn’.
A dazzling oil painting by Grant brings this enthralling journal entry to life. In the picture, he depicts Lady Ottoline wearing a bright yellow dress which sweeps the floor, along with an enormous yellow hat to match. Her arms are outstretched, performatively, as if she has just been caught dancing by the artist; she exudes some serious stage presence. Similarly, a painted portrait by Simon Bussy shows her in a striking green headdress, against a turquoise backdrop, looking like a colourful peacock or butterfly. These portrayals of Lady Ottoline illustrate the great pleasure which she took in dressing up; she invented herself through fashion, constructing the image of a fanciful, free-spirited heiress through an extensive array of ostentatious outfits, all made from luxurious fabrics.
Lady Ottoline’s theatricality extended throughout her home, which was filled with silks, oriental furnishings, paintings, bowls of potpourri and colourful flowers in the garden. Bloomsbury Group writer Garnett later detailed his overwhelming, visual experience of staying at Garsington: ‘The oak panelling had been painted a dark peacock blue-green; the bare and sombre dignity of Elizabethan wood and stone had been overwhelmed with an almost oriental magnificence: the luxuries of silk curtains and Persian carpets, cushions and pouffes.’
Lady Ottoline recognised that she had turned her home into a dramatic stage: ‘Sometimes I felt as if Garsington was a theatre, where week after week a travelling company would arrive and play their parts.’ Taking to the floor in showy costumes, she was, in many respects, a performance artist, and Garsington the backdrop to her production. It makes perfect sense, then, that she was featured as a melodramatic muse in the paintings of the artists she supported.
If there is one portrait which tells the true story of Lady Ottoline, however, it’s a black-and-white photograph by Adolph de Meyer from 1912. The shot shows her self-consciously posed for the camera, hand on hip, looking directly down the lens. Her long dress balloons and folds itself around her, while her pale face is framed by thick, wavy hair, which we know she dyed red. The light catches her expression – it is entirely serious.
Although few people are found smiling in portraits from this time, the stern intent on Lady Ottoline’s face is illuminating. This photograph exposes a woman who deliberately constructed herself in the image of a magnificent Pre-Raphaelite muse, like Elizabeth Siddall or Jane Morris. She wanted artists to use her as their model, thereby explaining the remarkable, defining feature of every single portrait of Lady Ottoline: you never once see her smiling.
The solemnness of Meyer’s photo indicates just how seriously Lady Ottoline took her job, as patron-muse of the Bloomsbury Group. A generous hostess, she treated her guests to much more than entertainment; she also provided them with practical aid, offering them space to focus on their creative endeavours and a refuge during World War One. ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,’ wrote Woolf, and this is exactly what Lady Ottoline gave to those whom she supported, transforming Garsington into a safe retreat for artists and writers.
It was not just the Bloomsbury Group who benefited from Lady Ottoline’s benefaction. She and her husband assisted numerous young, aspiring writers, including Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon and T. S. Eliot, whose modernist work expressed their anti-war sentiment. The novelist Henry Green also recognised her commitment ‘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’.
One of the most famous writers to stay at Garsington was D. H. Lawrence – he and Lady Ottoline shared an interest in novels, poetry, politics and museums, which they visited together during day trips into Oxford. In intimate letters to her, Lawrence reflected that ‘there is a bond between us, in spirit, deep to the bottom’. The manor was not merely a guesthouse for the author, but it had become his ‘spiritual home’. While he may have been flattering his hostess in return for future favours, these letters seem heartfelt and the words genuinely meant.
It’s clear that there was an intellectual connection between this mistress-muse and her artists. Far beyond offering financial support and a practical space to write, and on top of hosting parties where they could meet similar-minded individuals and other wealthy patrons, Lady Ottoline offered her guests the opportunity to engage in intellectual discussion and share ideas. She was an important contributor to these debates, revelling in her role: ‘The best and most exciting talks we had, were as we filed up to bed at night. These talks always seemed to have an essence and an exciting quality of their own. Slowly, lingering step by step up the old oak staircase, each bearing and waving about our old-fashioned flat silver candle-sticks, talking, talking, and then in groups in the wide matting-covered passage, with its old cabinets and chests of drawers and oriental porcelain, we would stand, having perhaps come to the most exciting knot of our discussions… a few generally followed me into my bedroom, and crouched round the wood fire… those fire-lit talks wove a web of intimacy and understanding between us.’
Backing up Lady Ottoline’s account, the British biographer and historian David Cecil, who had stayed at Garsington, recognised her indispensable contributions to those who surrounded her: ‘In the company of her distinguished friends she seemed of their spiritual kin, and in force and originality of personality wholly their equal. One looked at her and listened to her and remembered her as much as them.’
It is evident just how much the circle of artists and writers around Lady Ottoline meant to her. As she reflected, ‘I was interested in them all, and threw myself into their lives.’ At times, friendship evolved into romantic relationships; we know Lady Ottoline had affairs with Augustus John and philosopher Bertrand Russell, among others. She also recalled her attraction to Woolf: ‘This strange, lovely, furtive creature… comes and goes, she folds her cloak around her and vanishes, having shot into her victim’s heart a quiverful of teasing arrows.’
There was genuine affection, on both sides, between Garsington’s guests and their benevolent hostess. She felt a deep connection with many of them, becoming involved in their lives beyond what is usually expected of an artist’s patron. A keen artist in her own right, Lady Ottoline also photographed her famous contemporaries, typically seated at work in the sanctuary of her house and gardens, or standing posed for her camera, clutching handwritten papers. She kept these images in a personal photo album, held very dear to her, proving their great importance in her life.
But Lady Ottoline was not always repaid kindly. In D. H. Lawrence’s novel Women in Love the character of Hermione Roddice is unmistakably a caricature of Lady Ottoline: ‘Her long, pale face, that she carried lifted up, somewhat in the Rossetti fashion, seemed almost drugged, as if a strange mass of thoughts coiled in the darkness within her.’ Lady Ottoline was horrified to find herself represented in this manner, and by a man she considered her friend: ‘I read it and found myself going pale with horror, for nothing could have been more vile and obviously spiteful and contemptuous than the portrait of me that I found there.’ After reading the novel, she broke off contact with Lawrence for a decade.
Huxley, too, caricatured Garsington in his first novel, Crome Yellow, which tells the story of a house party at Crome, a parodic version of Lady Ottoline’s manor. She found this equally upsetting: ‘When I read in it the description of our life at Garsington, all distorted, caricatured and mocked at, I was horrified.’ Lady Ottoline had been betrayed by the writers whom she had supported.
While she could control her own appearance, she couldn’t dictate how artists or writers depicted her, and didn’t always like what was reflected back. Perhaps it was because she tried so hard to fashion herself in the image of a muse that Lawrence and Huxley poked fun at her through caricature. Lady Ottoline – and quite rightly so – felt that these portrayals were unfair, especially since she considered both men to be close friends.
Her hurt at these critical portrayals demonstrates that, beneath her extroverted exterior, there was a more sensitive side to her character. Despite hosting lavish parties and welcoming a constant influx of guests into her home, Lady Ottoline also craved time alone. In solitary moments, she wrote extensively in a journal in which she remarked on the huge amount of ‘support and sympathy and encouragement’ she gave to those who stayed at Garsington and who, at times, emotionally drained her with their demands for constant praise and affection.
We can also see from Lady Ottoline’s writings that she suffered, on occasions, from depression. She frequently imagines herself as a bird in a gilded cage, ‘longing to get out and fly away, away far from the batterings and harshnesses of those around me’. With the creation of Garsington as a shelter and nurturing environment for artists, particularly those who held conscientious objector status, came great responsibility from which she could not simply flee.
Lady Ottoline’s suffering at the cruel caricatured representations of her also shows just how much musedom meant to her, and the extent to which she committed to it. Yes, Lady Ottoline manufactured her image as a larger-than-life, bohemian model for multiple artists, enjoying the theatricality of the part. However, she also entered into this position with sincerity, consideration and the utmost respect for the duties it required.
Countless artists and writers recognised the immense contribution that Lady Ottoline made to their careers. Lawrence even later apologised for the upset he had caused, reflecting on the heiress’s positive effect on his life: ‘You’ve been an important influence in lots of lives, as you have in mine: through being fundamentally generous, and through being Ottoline. After all, there’s only one Ottoline. And she has moved one’s imagination.’
Lady Ottoline invited artists to immortalise her through their work, encouraging them to see her as an auburn-haired, Pre-Raphaelite model, dressed in long, flowing gowns. In contrast to many muses from art history, she enjoyed a financial position of power; but this alone could not dictate how an artist or writer depicted her. In contrast to a paying client, able to stipulate their representation in a commissioned portrait – Lady Ottoline was at the mercy of their imaginations; but this does, of course, also prove that she had succeeded in her aim: to become a true muse.
We do also know that Lady Ottoline liked many of her portraits, which she endorsed by hanging them in her home. Among the approved portraits was John’s painting, Lady Ottoline, which she positioned above her mantelpiece. John has captured both sides of her – the majestic, magnificent mistress and a more vulnerable individual. If you look closely at her eyes, they are watchful; this is not an invincible woman, even if she wants you to believe it. This sensibility is what enabled her to truly connect with the artists and writers at Garsington, who were moved to portray this complex character across art forms.
Becoming a muse entailed much more than game-playing and dressing up for Lady Ottoline. Instead, she was driven by a serious intent to inspire some of the most important artists of the twentieth century, both in and beyond the Bloomsbury Group. Flouting social conventions in a subversive act of allyship, she created a paradise for other pacifists, conscientious objectors and a wider group of creatives, successfully influencing their modern lives and careers in her own determinedly sensational style.