GARSINGTON REVISITED, a new book updating the legend of the flamboyant benefactor of the arts, Lady Ottoline Morrell. This book by SANDRA JOBSON DARROCH is a revised edition of her original biography of Ottoline first published in 1976 by Chatto & Windus and later in paperback. As well as being updated, the book contains hitherto unpublished information about Ottoline's "skeletons in her cupboard" as David Garnett called them. The book also includes a selection of vignettes or Interludes about the extraordinary people Sandra met and places she went to in the course of her years of research. After reading a preview copy of Garsington Revisited, the eminent biographer, Sir Michael Holroyd, wrote: "It's a book of real originality. All I can say is that it deserves both hands with their "Thumbs up!". With many congratulations, Michael." Sandra was fortunate to meet and interview the last living members of the Bloomsbury Group, enjoying lunch at Charleston with Duncan Grant, and offered a ship's tumbler of sherry by that other great Bloomsburyan, David Garnett. Sandra was stalked by the 7th Duke of Portland in the grounds of Welbeck Abbey, and journeyed to Texas to read more than 8,000 letters to Ottoline written by a "Who's Who" of Britain's literary and artistic elite (including 2,500 letters from her most persistent lover, Bertrand Russell, who was besotted with Ottoline). The book casts a new light on Ottoline's friendship with D.H. Lawrence and their falling-out after he portrayed her in Women in Love. Four decades on from her original book, which she wrote when still in her twenties, Sandra is as impressed as ever by Ottoline's courage and determination to forgo the comfortable life of an aristocrat to mix with - and champion - some of the 20th century's leading artists and writers.
