Lost girls : love, war and literature 1939-1951
Taylor, D. J. (David John), 1960-2019
Books
'Lost girls' was the name given by writer Peter Quennell to the young women at large in Blitz-era literary London. Lost Girls concentrates on just four: Lys Lubbock, Sonia Brownell, Barbara Skelton and Janetta Parlade. Chic, glamorous and bohemian, as likely to be found living in a rat-haunted maisonette as dining at the Ritz, they cut a swathe through English literary and artistic life in the 1940s. Three of them had affairs with Lucian Freud. One of them married George Orwell. Another became the mistress of the King of Egypt and was flogged by him on the steps of the Royal Palace. And all of them were associated with the decade's most celebrated literary magazine, Horizon, and its charismatic editor Cyril Connolly. Lys, Sonia, Barbara and Janetta had very different - and sometimes explosive personalities - but taken together they form a distinctive part of the war-time demographic: bright, beautiful, independent-minded women with tough upbringings behind them determined to make the most of their lives in a highly uncertain environment. Theirs was the world of the buzz bomb, the cocktail party behind blackout curtains, the severed hand seen on the pavement in the Bloomsbury square, the rustle of a telegram falling through the letter-box, the hasty farewell to another half who might not ever come back, a world of living for the moment and snatching at pleasure before it disappeared. But if their trail runs through vast acreages of war-time cultural life then, in the end, it returns to Connolly and his amorous web-spinning, in which all four of them regularly featured and which sometimes complicated their emotional lives to the point of meltdown. The Lost Girls were the product of a highly artificial environment. On Horizon's closure in 1950, thegirls went on to have affairs with dukes, feature in celebrity divorce cases and make appearances in the novels of George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and Nancy Mitford. However tiny their number, they are a genuine missing link between the first wave of newly-liberated young women of the post-Great War era and the Dionysiac free-for-all of the 1960s.
Main title:
Lost girls : love, war and literature 1939-1951 / D.J. Taylor.
Imprint:
Constable, 2019.
Collation:
xii, 387 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (black and white) ; 25 cm
Notes:
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN:
9781472126863 (hbk)9781472126832 (ePub ebook)
Language:
English
Subject:
Lubbock, LysBrownell, SoniaSkelton, BarbaraParlade, JanettaWomen -- Great Britain -- History -- 20th centuryEuropean historyBiography: historical, political & militaryHistoryBiography: generalLater 20th century c 1950 to c 1999Collected biographiesCultural studiesSocial classesGreat Britain -- Social conditions -- 20th centuryGreat Britain -- Intellectual life -- 20th centuryGreat Britain -- History -- George VI, 1936-1952History
BRN:
640855