![]() But both had numerous external relationships. The Morrells had two children-a daughter, Julian, and her twin brother, Hugh, who died soon after birth-and remained together until Ottoline’s death, in 1938. Lady Ottoline’s marriage to Philip, which began in 1902, combined observance of convention with its subversion. Morrell turned Garsington-her country home, outside Oxford-into what one guest called a “fluttering parrot-house of greens, reds and yellows.” Photograph © National Portrait Gallery, London Lawrence’s portrait extinguished their friendship. Lawrence-not himself a part of the Bloomsbury group, but well acquainted with its members-drew on Morrell in his characterization of Hermione Roddice, the aloof, domineering heiress in “Women in Love.” (“People were silent when she passed, impressed, roused, wanting to jeer, yet for some reason silenced.”) Morrell, who kept a diary, declared in one entry that “conventionality is deadness,” but she was conventional enough to be hurt by her friends’ sniping. Lytton Strachey, the critic, who was a frequent guest of Morrell’s, said that she was, like Garsington itself, “very impressive, patched, gilded and preposterous.” According to the artist Vanessa Bell, Woolf’s sister, Morrell had “a terrifically energetic and vigorous character with a definite rather bad taste.” D. H. Morrell is one of the most chronicled and caricatured figures connected with the Bloomsbury group, the association of writers, artists, and thinkers who, in the early twentieth century, shared living spaces in a district of London known for its leafy squares, and whose intellectual and erotic paths intertwined well after those residential arrangements ended. The poet and writer Siegfried Sassoon, visiting Garsington in 1916, remarked on Morrell’s “voluminous pale-pink Turkish trousers.” Desmond MacCarthy, the British critic, described one of Morrell’s hats as being “like a crimson tea cosy trimmed with hedgehogs.” Her contemporaries found the performance at once irresistible and risible. As if to accompany her lush décor, she cultivated an extravagant persona, especially through her clothing. Morrell, who was born in 1873, just nine years before Woolf-hardly an old-ninny interval-may not have written novels, but she certainly took pleasure in creation. Besides, I have such wretched health-But the pleasure of creation, Virginia, must transcend all others.” ![]() Morrell replied, “Ah, but I’ve no time-never any time. “We asked the poor old ninny why, with this passion for literature, she didn’t write,” Woolf wrote. ![]() Woolf characterized Morrell herself with a note of satire, observing that her conversational “drift is always almost bewilderingly meandering.” While on an afternoon walk, Morrell had leaned on a parasol and offered a discourse on love-“Isn’t it sad that no one really falls in love nowadays?”-before declaring her dedication to the natural world and to literature. The entrance hall was laid with Persian carpets and, as Morrell’s biographer Miranda Seymour has written, the pearly gray paint on the walls was streaked with pink, “to create the effect of a winter sunset.” Woolf, in her diary, noted that the Italianate garden fashioned by Morrell-with paved terraces, brilliantly colored flower beds, and a pond surrounded by yew-tree hedges clipped with niches for statuary-was “almost melodramatically perfect.” The house, a ramshackle Jacobean mansion that the Morrells had acquired five years earlier, had been vividly redecorated by Ottoline into what one guest called a “fluttering parrot-house of greens, reds and yellows.” One sitting room was painted with a translucent seafoam wash another was covered in deep Venetian red, and early visitors were invited to apply thin lines of gold paint to the edges of wooden panels. ![]() In July, 1918, Virginia Woolf spent a weekend at Garsington-a country home, outside Oxford, owned by Lady Ottoline Morrell, a celebrated hostess of the era, and her husband, Philip Morrell, a Member of Parliament.
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