Ettie: The Intimate Life And Dauntless Spirit Of Lady Desborough [Hardcover]

'Richard Davenport-Hines's stirring history of Ettie Fane, a woman of sophistication and beauty seemingly blighted with bad luck. The picture of English aristocratic determination, she remains uncowed to the end.' (VOGUE )

'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 deserves to be widely read... The book is a joy to read, sparkling and fresh and full of good things. A real delight.' (Jane Ridley LITERARY REVIEW )

'this intelligent and well-written book... provides a rich and satisfying portrait of an age that now seems infinitely remote' (THE SPECTATOR )

'Davenport-Hines knows his subject well and writes about the period with insight and understanding.' (CATHOLIC HERALD )

'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 deserves to be widely read... The book is a joy to read, sparkling and fresh and full of good things. A real delight.'

The life of Lady Desborough - beautiful heiress, aristocratic hostess, unfaithful wife, tragic mother, Edwardian icon. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Born in 1867 and orphaned at three, Ettie Fane was brought up by a beloved grandmother and then two adoring, almost incestuous, bachelor uncles. At twenty she married Willy Grenfell, later Lord Desborough, a genial sportsman. Beautiful, rich, charming and clever, Ettie soon became the centre of the Souls, arbiters of wit and elegance, and a leading hostess at the two magnificent country houses she had inherited. Leading politicians, writers and artists were very much part of her circle. This was the England of country-house parties, separate bedrooms and well understood liaisons. Ettie was soon having affairs. But there was a dark side too, as this book will reveal. Ettie could be manipulative and cruel, and her husband increasingly took long holidays abroad. Her eldest son Julian, after a nervous breakdown at Oxford, rejected her world and values. Nemesis and tragedy were not far away. In 1915 Julian died of war wounds. Six weeks later her second son Billy was killed in action. Her youngest son Ivo would be killed shortly after the war. Other deaths on the Western Front - of lovers and younger admirers - hurt her terribly too. But despite intense private misery, she reacted with outward courage and self-mastery. Grief revealed the greatness of her spirit. In the 1920s and 1930s she continued to collect new types, especially gifted young men, relishing people of all ages up to her death in 1952, a redoutable survivor from a vanished age.

Richard Davenport-Hines was born in 1953. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society, he is a past winner of the Wolfson Prize for History and Biography. He has most recently edited Hugh Trevor-Roper's LETTERS FROM OXFORD for publication in July 2006. He lives in London.