Lady Ottoline Morrell - Later Life

Later Life

Later, Lady Ottoline remained a regular host to the adherents of the Bloomsbury Group, in particular Virginia Woolf, and to many other artists and authors, who included WB Yeats, LP Hartley, T.S. Eliot, and an enduring friendship with Welsh painter Augustus John. She was an influential patron to many of them, and a valued friend, who nevertheless attracted understandable mockery, due to her combination of eccentric attire with an aristocratic manner, extreme shyness and a deep religious faith that set her apart from her times. Her pioneering work as a decorator, colourist, and garden designer remains, to this day, curiously undervalued, but it was for her great gift for friendship that she was mourned when she died in 1938. Henry Green, the novelist, wrote to Philip Morrell of "her love for all things true and beautiful which she had more than anyone...no one can ever know the immeasurable good she did." (quoted by Miranda Seymour, in Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale, p 416)