Jane Ridley
Woman in Black
Ettie: The Intimate Life and Dauntless Spirit of Lady Desborough
By Richard Davenport-Hines
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 472pp £25 order from our bookshop
This must have been a hard book to sell. Ettie Desborough is not exactly a household name. If her great friend Arthur Balfour was a whiff of scent on a lady’s pocket handkerchief, Ettie seems even more evanescent. A society hostess, a leading member of the Souls, an Edwardian grande dame – her story seems almost impossible to breathe into life, still less to conjure onto the stern shelves of Waterstones. In fact, as Richard Davenport-Hines demonstrates triumphantly in this superb biography, Ettie Desborough’s life is a compelling and moving story of love and loss as well as an important slice of social history, and it deserves to be widely read.
Ettie’s earliest memory was sitting at the age of three in a dark room wearing a black dress surrounded by weeping people dressed in black. They were mourning her father. Her mother had died two years earlier. Her only brother later died at the age of seven. As a child
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Within hours, the news spread. A grimy gang of desperadoes had been captured just in time to stop them setting out on an assassination plot of shocking audacity.'
@katheder on the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/butchers-knives-treason-and-plot
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete
'Cruickshank’s history reveals an extraordinary eclecticism of architectural styles and buildings, from Dutch Revivalism to Arts and Crafts experimentation, from Georgian terraces to Victorian mansion blocks.'
William Boyd on the architecture of Chelsea.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/where-george-eliot-meets-mick-jagger