Lady Ottoline Morrell - Her After-life in Literature

Her After-life in Literature

Ottoline Morrell wrote two volumes of memoirs, but these were edited and revised after her death, losing a little of their charm and much of their intimate detail in that process. She also maintained detailed journals, over a period of twenty years, which remain unpublished. But perhaps Lady Ottoline's most interesting literary legacy is the wealth of representations of her that appear in 20th century literature. She was the inspiration for Mrs Bidlake in Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point, for Hermione Roddice in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love, for Lady Caroline Bury in Graham Greene's It's a Battlefield, and for Lady Sybilline Quarrell in Alan Bennett's Forty Years On. The Coming Back (1933), another novel which portrays her, was written by Constance Malleson, one of Ottoline's many rivals for the affection of Bertrand Russell. Some critics consider her the inspiration for Lawrence's Lady Chatterley. Huxley's roman à clef, Crome Yellow depicts the life at a thinly-veiled Garsington.

Non-literary portraits are also part of this interesting legacy, for example, as seen in the artistic photographs of her by Cecil Beaton. There are portraits by Henry Lamb, Duncan Grant, Augustus John, and others. She is portrayed by Tilda Swinton in Derek Jarman's film Wittgenstein and by Penelope Wilton in Christopher Hampton's film Carrington.