Lady Ottoline Morrell (Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Morrell) Biography

British literary hostess and memoirist, born in London; she studied briefly at Somerville College, Oxford. In 1902 she married Philip Morrell, who became Liberal Member of Parliament in 1906. Her activities as a hostess and patron of the arts began in 1908 at her home in Bedford Square, London. Her hospitality entered its most celebrated phase after her move to Garsington Manor, Oxfordshire, in 1915. Among her visitors there were Bertrand Russell, Augustus John, with both of whom she had affairs, W. B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Siegfried Sassoon, John Maynard Keynes, and T. S. Eliot, with whom she sustained a long friendship. D. H. Lawrence used her as the model for the repellent ‘Hermione Roddice’ in Women in Love (1921). She is also recognizable in the figure of ‘Priscilla Wimbush’ in Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow (1921). Robert Gathorne-Hardy edited two volumes of her memoirs (1963, 1974). Ottoline (1976) is a biography by S. J. Darroch.