The Bolter
On sale
5th March 2009
Price: £14.99
Spears Book Awards, 2009
On Friday 25th May, 1934, a forty-one-year-old woman walked into the lobby of Claridge’s Hotel to meet the nineteen-year-old son whose face she did not know. Fifteen years earlier, as the First World War ended, Idina Sackville shocked high society by leaving his multimillionaire father to run off to Africa with a near penniless man.
An inspiration for Nancy Mitford’s character The Bolter, painted by William Orpen, and photographed by Cecil Beaton, Sackville went on to divorce a total of five times, yet died with a picture of her first love by her bed. Her struggle to reinvent her life with each new marriage left one husband murdered and branded her the ‘high priestess’ of White Mischief’s bed-hopping Happy Valley in Kenya.
Sackville’s life was so scandalous that it was kept a secret from her great-granddaughter Frances Osborne. Now, Osborne tells the moving tale of betrayal and heartbreak behind Sackville’s road to scandal and return, painting a dazzling portrait of high society in the early twentieth century.
An inspiration for Nancy Mitford’s character The Bolter, painted by William Orpen, and photographed by Cecil Beaton, Sackville went on to divorce a total of five times, yet died with a picture of her first love by her bed. Her struggle to reinvent her life with each new marriage left one husband murdered and branded her the ‘high priestess’ of White Mischief’s bed-hopping Happy Valley in Kenya.
Sackville’s life was so scandalous that it was kept a secret from her great-granddaughter Frances Osborne. Now, Osborne tells the moving tale of betrayal and heartbreak behind Sackville’s road to scandal and return, painting a dazzling portrait of high society in the early twentieth century.
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Reviews
The Bolter is a biographical treat
Frances Osborne has produced a racy romp underpinned by some impressive research. She understands the period and the world she describes
A corker of a subject. Idina's behaviour... probably inspired The Bolter in Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love. Osborne's richly wrought descriptions of glittering Paris nights and lush mountainous landscapes of Kenya's Happy Valley are fabulous... A breakneck-paced, thoroughly diverting story
A wonderfully engaging book which combines the tingling immediacy of the best kind of history with the stay-up-till-3am-to-finish-it urgency of a bestseller
A superb portrait of an astonishing woman and her times
An engaging book and a definitive final look back at those naughty people who, between the wars, took their bad behaviour off to Kenya and whose upper-class delinquency became gilded with unjustified glamour
Rich, title, witty, beguiling, Lady Idina Sackville had all the gifts, except, perhaps, judgement. Frances Osborne has written an enthralling account of a dazzling, troubled, life
Osborne has had, as you would expect a family member, unprecedented access to Sackville's diaries - and those of most of her husbands
Osborne unearthed the moving truth behind the headlines. It's a melancholy, vivid portrait of a lost lady and her troubled world
Osborne has written an engaging book, drawing a revealing portrait of a remarkable woman and adding humanity to her 'scandalous' life... And what a life it was
Passionate and headstrong, Lady Idina was determined to be free even if the cost was scandal and ruin. Frances Osborne has brilliantly captured not only one woman's life but an entire lost society
A vivid portrait of her scandalous ancestor and her relationships with family members, while conjuring a vanished world with novelistic detail and flair
Osborne is an imaginative scene painter... Idina wasn't admirable, but Osborne makes us sympathise with her
If notorious relatives make for the best dinner-party anecdotes, then Frances Osborne should be able to dine out for decades.... Enthralling
A tragic and deeply moving tale... far more gripping than any novel I have read for years
Fascinating... beautifully written... Frances Osborne brings the decadence of Britain's dying aristocracy vividly to life in this story of scandal and heartbreak
A rumbustious and harrowing biography that takes us from London to Newport to Kenya... A feast for the Anglophile
[Idina Sackville's] life story, speckled with the names of the rich and famous, is a miniature history lesson, bringing into sharp focus both world wars, the Jazz Age, and the colonization of Kenya. . . . Sackville's passion lights up the page
Osborne's lively narrative brings Lady Idina Sackville boldly to life. . . the text, most lyrical when describing the landscapes around Idina's African residences, proves than an adventurous spirit continues to run in this fascinating family
Truly interesting. Osborne paints an enthralling portrait of upper-class English life just before, during and immediately after the Great War. Frivolous, rich, sexy, [and] achingly fashionable
A bewitching character brilliantly painted
Osborne is a graceful writer, excellent at evoking the atmosphere of London during the First World War and Happy Valley in the Twenties. Her judgement is pitch-perfect, never letting Idina off the hook but at the same time sympathetic towards her, and she skilfully captures the myriad twists and turns of a turbulent life