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Dear Lady Ginger: An exchange of letters between Lady Ottoline Morrell and D'Arcy Cresswell, together with Ottoline Morrell's essay on Katherine Mansfield
Shipped from UK, please allow 10 to 21 business days for arrival. A beautiful, slim volume of letters exchanged between Lady Ottoline Morrell and D'Arcy Cresswell and edited by Helen Shaw. Contains numerous illustrations. Book is like new, with only slight shelfwear on the very top and bottom of spine. Boards are handsomely decorative, with spine stamped in gilt. Pages and boards are crisp and straight, and spine is unbroken. Overall, an excellent copy in near-new condition.
Hardcover
Published January 1, 1983
12 people want to read
About the author
Ottoline Violet Anne Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell
11 books5 followersLady Ottoline Violet Anne Morrell was an English aristocrat and society hostess. Her patronage was influential in artistic and intellectual circles, where she befriended writers including Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence, and artists including Mark Gertler, Dora Carrington and Gilbert Spencer.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
November 16, 2017
What a delightful collection of letters this is. While I knew something about Lady Ottoline Morrell and her links to British literary and artistic life in the first half of the twentieth century, I'm afraid I had never heard of D'Arcy Cresswell before.
After reading this collection on of his letters, I certainly want to know more about him. The collection is a little one sided, with many more letters from Cresswell than Lady Ottoline, so you have to guess at some of what was said.
I was very struck by the friendship between the two, which seemed both genuine and respectful. I loved the humour they shared and the fact he teases her about her terrible writing. He often addressed her as Lady Ginger, which was due to a misreading of her handwriting.
I found it sad at the close of the book that Cresswell wrote to Lady Ottoline a few days after her death, not knowing it had happened. Letters would take months to travel between New Zealand and England leading to missed references and forgetting where their conversations had got to.
I found the book fascinating it two ways. First for the life of Cresswell that it presents, living on an isolated farm in the hill country and then in a small hut in a bay north of Auckland. His tenacity shines through and also his wish to get back to England and see Lady Ottoline again. And then there is the life in England with so many famous names, people Ottoline met and surrounded herself with. D H Lawrence, W B Yeats, Lytton Strachey, Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. A who's who of literary life in London. Interesting too are the other names - people who didn't become famous or well known, but who might have published the latest fashionable book. It is a fascinating portrait of Britain and New Zealand in the 1930s.
After reading this collection on of his letters, I certainly want to know more about him. The collection is a little one sided, with many more letters from Cresswell than Lady Ottoline, so you have to guess at some of what was said.
I was very struck by the friendship between the two, which seemed both genuine and respectful. I loved the humour they shared and the fact he teases her about her terrible writing. He often addressed her as Lady Ginger, which was due to a misreading of her handwriting.
I found it sad at the close of the book that Cresswell wrote to Lady Ottoline a few days after her death, not knowing it had happened. Letters would take months to travel between New Zealand and England leading to missed references and forgetting where their conversations had got to.
I found the book fascinating it two ways. First for the life of Cresswell that it presents, living on an isolated farm in the hill country and then in a small hut in a bay north of Auckland. His tenacity shines through and also his wish to get back to England and see Lady Ottoline again. And then there is the life in England with so many famous names, people Ottoline met and surrounded herself with. D H Lawrence, W B Yeats, Lytton Strachey, Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. A who's who of literary life in London. Interesting too are the other names - people who didn't become famous or well known, but who might have published the latest fashionable book. It is a fascinating portrait of Britain and New Zealand in the 1930s.
Displaying 1 of 1 review