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 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...
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...
Friends, Associates Hope Mirrlees
Before her death, Ottoline Morrell named writer HM as one of her literary executors; the two had been friends for some twenty years.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Bell, Anne Olivier and Andrew McNeillieEditors , Hogarth Press, 1984.
5: 140
Friends, Associates Rose Allatini
Virginia Woolf , who gives no indication of having met RA herself, recorded satirically how in February 1919, after the appearace and prosecution of Despised and Rejected, Lady Ottoline Morrellswooped down upon Allatini...
Friends, Associates Henry Green
HG was one of those whom Lady Ottoline Morrell entertained at her London salon and whose careers she nurtured with encouragement and influence. Explicitly speaking for others as well as himself, he said she took...
Friends, Associates Ruth Pitter
RP knew T. S. Eliot well enough to enjoy a courtly encounter with him at a bus stop, but she felt his great innovations had not necessarily been a good thing for English poetry, and...
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 Elizabeth von Arnim
On her return to London, EA found that her husband's smear campaign had effectively alienated her from her established social set. She responded by cultivating a friendship with a younger man, Alexander Stuart Frere-Reeves
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 Dora Russell
During this period, the Russells' friends and associates included Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson , Ottoline Morrell , T. S. Eliot , W. B. Yeats , G. B. and Charlotte Shaw , Desmond MacCarthy ...
Friends, Associates Enid Bagnold
Bagnold's biographer Anne Sebba writes that try as [EB ] might to belong to the artists' milieu, she could not release her other foot from the smart set.
Sebba, Anne. Enid Bagnold: The Authorized Biography. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986.
148
Bagnold's friends included socialist...
Friends, Associates Edith Sitwell
ES had many friendships, and there were few notables in the artistic world whom she did not meet. Her friendships were quite volatile, with frequent quarrels, sometimes caused by the practical jokes and the heightened...
Friends, Associates Lady Margaret Sackville
LMS became, according to Mary Agnes Hamilton , one of those [e]verybody who was anybody in the anti-war movement, who gathered around Lady Ottoline Morrell .
Hamilton, Mary Agnes. Remembering My Good Friends. Jonathan Cape, 1944.
78
She was an occasional visitor at the Morrells'...

Timeline

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.