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Bohemian & Libertine · Garsington, Oxfordshire

Garsington Manor (Lady Ottoline Morrell's set)

Ottoline Morrell's Tudor manor was the great house-party of literary modernism: Bertrand Russell was her lover, Lawrence repaid her hospitality by putting her in 'Women in Love', and the peacock-stalked gardens hosted more entanglements than the guest book could decently record.

StatusDocumented history
Datesalon 1915–1928
The peopleLady Ottoline Morrell, Bertrand Russell, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Dora Carrington
The siteGarsington Manor (private)
Coordinates51.71611, -1.16278 (confidence 3/5)

The story

Lady Ottoline Morrell bought Garsington Manor in 1915 and painted it the colours of her own imagination — peacock-blue panelling, red lacquer, Spanish leather — with an Italianate pond and loggia outside. During the First World War she made it a refuge for conscientious objectors, many from Bloomsbury, who accepted her hospitality and then mocked her behind her back. Her affair with the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1911–1916) produced a correspondence of thousands of letters, now split between the Harry Ransom Center in Texas (over 1,900 from Russell) and McMaster University (around 1,500 from Ottoline). In 1920 she took up with "Tiger" — Lionel Gomme, a village stonemason cutting her garden plinths — and found, at last, real happiness. Her husband Philip caused a family crisis in 1917 by fathering children on the maid and the secretary at once. D. H. Lawrence repaid her in Women in Love (1920) and Aldous Huxley in Crome Yellow (1921); both portraits hurt her. Garsington is now a private house.

More stories at this spot

Sassoon told to walk out of the war

Among the conscientious objectors Ottoline sheltered at Garsington was the war poet Siegfried Sassoon, recuperating from wounds. There he was encouraged to make his public protest against the conduct of the war — one of the more consequential things ever hatched in a country-house drawing room.

Sources

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