Introduction

When KM was buried in the graveyard of Fontainebleau-Avon just outside Paris, her coffin was covered in the beautiful shawl of Spanish silk given to her by Lady Ottoline Morrell. Ottoline was not there for the funeral; and both the presence and the absence seem to represent how the great lady was and was not significant in the life of the writer.

KM’s first letter to Ottoline was written in January 1916 and her last in September 1922 five months before her death. Over most of this period Ottoline was at Garsington and KM somewhere else, usually London, but also Paris, Bandol, Cornwall, Ospedaletti, Menton and Switzerland. She did get to Garsington at rare intervals, the first in July 1916, and there were times when Ottoline visited her in London, where she sent KM flowers in profusion from her beautiful gardens. In the manner of a grand English lady and society hostess, Ottoline was inclined to gush in her letters, and KM gushed back. KM’s was gush of the highest calibre; but I suspect Ottoline’s was of the kind meant to put her interlocutors at ease. To gush back might have been a mistake. In any case it was not good for the prose. Claire Tomalin says, ‘The flattery and “charm” of Katherine’s letters to Ottoline are among her grosser effects.’ But Tomalin adds, ‘nevertheless, Ottoline was charmed. It was not simply that she was gullible; she also perceived something of her own rebellious spirit in Katherine and found it sympathetic’.

KM among ‘the Blooms Berries’, as she called them, was frequently spoken of with admiration. Her conversation, when she was not being enigmatic and silent ‘like a Japanese mask’, was witty; she was a clever mimic, had a nice singing voice, read poetry beautifully, and made Leonard Woolf laugh as no one else could. But the admiration was always mixed with uncertainty and suspicion, and more than a pinch of snobbery. ‘An interesting creature’, Lytton Strachey observed, ‘very amusing and sufficiently mysterious’ with ‘a sharp and slightly vulgarly fanciful intellect’. Virginia Woolf thought her perfume ‘cheap’. Ottoline (whose own clothes were extravagant and peculiar) was snobbish about the way she dressed: ‘rather a cheap taste, slightly Swan & Edgar’ – in other words, however nice, ‘off the peg’ rather than tailored.