Lady Ottoline Morrell

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Standard Name: Morrell, Lady Ottoline
Birth Name: Ottoline Violet Anne Bentinck
Titled: Lady Ottoline Anne Violet Bentinck
Married Name: Lady Ottoline Anne Violet Morrell
LOM is best known as an early twentieth-century literary hostess who appears frequently in the memoirs, biographies, and fictions written by her guests. She aspired to be a writer herself, and she produced journals, letters, and memoirs, as well as collaborating with Bertrand Russell on fiction and non-fiction.
Sepia-toned photograph of Lady Ottoline Morrell, shown from the shoulders up. She is wearing a dark velvet dress with a layer of lace at the top and arms made of semi-sheer ribbed material. Her hair is jaw length, dark, and curly, and she is wearing pearl earrings and necklaces.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Cultural formation Dora Carrington
Here, Morrell and another guest, writer Aldous Huxley (who were both friends of and loyal to Carrington's admirer Mark Gertler ), confronted Carrington about her reluctance to give up her virginity. She described the episode...
Family and Intimate relationships Constance Holme
He was thirteen years older than she was. He too had succeeded his father in his position, and his employer was Lord Henry Bentinck , brother of Lady Ottoline Morrell . The marriage was childless...
Family and Intimate relationships Aldous Huxley
They met while she, a well-connected Belgian, boarded at Garsington (the home of Member of Parliament Philip Morrell and his wife Ottoline Morrell , a centre for conscientious objectors, where AH spent a good deal...
Family and Intimate relationships Lady Margaret Sackville
The friendship between the widowed James Ramsay MacDonald , Labour politician, and LMS began in 1912 and proved important and long-lasting. She was said to have declined a proposal of marriage from him. The writer...
Friends, Associates Virginia Woolf
Early members of what VW called Old Bloomsbury (to distinguish the original members of the group from later additions) included Virginia and Vanessa Stephen , Leonard Woolf , Clive Bell , E. M. Forster ,...
Friends, Associates Mary Agnes Hamilton
The day after war was declared, MAH was taken to meet Vernon Lee , a writer she much admired, who was then staying at the London home (44 Bedford Square) of Lady Ottoline and Philip Morrell .
Hamilton, Mary Agnes. Remembering My Good Friends. Jonathan Cape, 1944.
73
Friends, Associates Hope Mirrlees
After her return from Paris, HM was occupied with various friendships and interests. By now she could count Vivien and T. S. Eliot , Lytton Strachey , Molly and Desmond MacCarthy , Duncan Grant ,...
Friends, Associates Virginia Woolf
Later, however, Bloomsbury was attacked as an arrogant, self-regarding, immoral, upper-class clique. D. H. Lawrence said Keynes and his friends were black beetles, and in Women in Love he attacked the group's aesthetic in...
Friends, Associates Dorothy Brett
DB paid her first visit to Lady Ottoline Morrell 's house at Garsington after meeting her in February of that year; October was also the month which saw her first meeting with D. H. and...
Friends, Associates Antonia White
In Chelsea AW formed a friendship with the painter Eliot Seabrooke , a large and centred personality
qtd. in
Dunn, Jane. Antonia White: A Life. Jonathan Cape, 1998.
72
who supplied an oasis of sanity in her life and helped her to sort out her opinions...
Friends, Associates Dorothy Wellesley
In Rome during the First World War, DW became a friend of two scholars, Geoffrey Scott , and Gerald Tyrwhitt, later Lord Berners .
Wellesley, Dorothy. Far Have I Travelled. James Barrie, 1952.
133
In the years after the war she formed her important...
Friends, Associates Dorothy Brett
Brett moved in various distinct social circles. Augustus John was an admired acquaintance. Virginia Woolf , a friend, nevertheless commented in 1921 on Brett being one of the entourage of Lady Ottoline Morrell , and...
Friends, Associates Dorothy Bussy
La Souco was visited regularly by all of their Bloomsbury Group friends, among them Lytton and the other Strachey siblings, the Vanessa and Clive Bell , Virginia and Leonard Woolf , John Maynard Keynes and...
Friends, Associates Helen Waddell
Friends from HW 's time at Somerville included Maude Clarke , whom she had known as a child and whose Oxford position had been one of the incentives to go there, and archaelogist Helen Lorimer
Friends, Associates Aldous Huxley
Those friends of Aldous whom his wife Maria referred to as the brilliant ones,
qtd. in
Bedford, Sybille. Aldous Huxley. Knopf; Harper & Row, 1974.
105
and found intimidatingly intellectual, included T. S. Eliot , Osbert , Edith , and Sacheverell Sitwell , various members...

Timeline

From early summer 1915: Garsington Manor, near Oxford, the home of...

Building item

From early summer 1915

Garsington Manor, near Oxford, the home of Lady Ottoline and Philip Morrell , became a centre for many pacifists, conscientious objectors, and non-pacifist critics of the war.
Berkman, Joyce Avrech. Pacifism in England, 1914-1939. Yale University, 1967, http://U of A HSS.
23
Seymour, Miranda. Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale. Farrar Straus Giroux, 1992.
223-4

Texts

Morrell, Lady Ottoline, and D’Arcy Cresswell. Dear Lady Ginger. Editor Shaw, Helen, Auckland University Press; Oxford University Press, 1983.
Morrell, Lady Ottoline, and D’Arcy Cresswell. Dear Lady Ginger. Editor Shaw, Helen, Century Press, 1984.
Morrell, Lady Ottoline, and Lord David Cecil. Lady Ottoline’s Album. Editor Heilbrun, Carolyn, Alfred A. Knopf, 1976.
Morrell, Lady Ottoline. Ottoline at Garsington. Editor Gathorne-Hardy, Robert, Faber and Faber, 1974.
Morrell, Lady Ottoline. Ottoline: The Early Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell. Editor Gathorne-Hardy, Robert, Faber and Faber, 1963.