Lady Ottoline Morrell

Lady Ottoline Morrell ( born June 16, 1873 in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, † April 21, 1938 in London) was an English aristocrat and patron of the arts. For notoriety they brought it primarily by their social role as hostess for a circle of writers and artists to the Bloomsbury circle, as well as through their affairs with several prominent contemporaries, including Bertrand Russell.

Life

Born Ottoline Violet Anne Cavendish - Bentinck was allowed from 1879, when her half-brother William the title of Duke of Portland inherited, lead the salutation Lady. She had multiple connections to the British nobility, including Elizabeth Bowes -Lyon was her cousin. In 1902 she married a liberal politician, Philip Morrell, with whom she had a daughter. With her husband she led an open relationship, both had several over the years by mutual knowledge lovers.

Bertrand Russell, whom she met when he worked politically with her husband, was from 1911 to 1916 her lover. With Russell it remained until the end of her in close friendship, which is attested to by numerous letters received.

Ottoline Morrell later had more affairs, including with the artist Augustus John, Roger Fry, and Dora Carrington, and with the writer Dorothy Bussy. Polyamory and bisexuality were not uncommon among the members of the Bloomsbury Group.

As a hostess Ottoline brought her home in London, which served as a salon, many prominent persons of liberal writers and artists scene together, including but not DH Lawrence, TS Eliot, Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf and Stephen Spender. In 1915, the couple Morrell Garsington Manor bought at Oxford, in the Ottoline members of the Bloomsbury circle received. Many of their guests they also supported financially.

Ottoline Morrell was caricatured in several literary works of their friends and guests. Were they inspired the characters of Mrs. Bidlake in Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley, Hermione Roddice in Women in Love ( Women in Love ) by DH Lawrence, Lady Caroline Bury in It's a Battlefield by Graham Greene and the Lady Sybilline Quarrell in Forty Years on by Alan Bennett. Some critics also suggest that the figure of Lady Chatterley is modeled after her.