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)

Read more about this topic:  Lady Ottoline Morrell

Famous quotes containing the word life:

    This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.
    Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)

    Consider his life which was valueless
    In terms of employment, hotel ledgers, news files.
    Consider. One bullet in ten thousand kills a man.
    Ask. Was so much expenditure justified
    On the death of one so young and so silly
    Lying under the olive tree, O world, O death?
    Stephen Spender (1909–1995)