Tell a friend about this book...
Friend's Email:
Subject: I have found a book that I think you would enjoy
Member $avings: $30,742,459.92
|
Books Available: 5,069,309
|
Members Online: 2,139
Your Source for Swapping & Buying Books Online!
How To Swap Books
Sign Up
Search 
Kiosk
All Books
PBS Market (New Books)
Book Browser
Advanced Search
Books Posted Today
Member Book Reviews
Award Winning Books
NYT Best Sellers
Most Traveled Copies
Club Wish List
Login
Community
Member Directory
Discussion Forums
Book Lists
Blog
Donations
Live Chat (1)
Box-O-Books
Maps
The Eclectic Pen
Fun Stuff
Top 100
Pulse of PBS
Spread The Word
Photo Gallery
Recipes
Club Tag Cloud
Member Testimonials
Help Center
Kiosk
Need Help?
Search - The Bolter
|
|
The Bolter Author: She was irresistible. She inspired fiction, fantasy, legend, and art. — Some say she was "the Bolter" of Nancy Mitford,s novel The Pursuit of Love. She "played" Iris Storm in Michael Arlen's celebrated novel about fashionable London's lost generation, The Green Hat, and Greta Garbo played her in A Woma... more »the movie made from Arlen?s book. She was painted by Orpen; photographed by Beaton; she was the model for Molyneaux's slinky wraparound dresses that became the look of the age -- the Jazz Age. Though not conventionally beautiful (she had a "shot-away chin"), Idina Sackville dazzled men and women alike, and made a habit of marrying whenever she fell in love -- five husbands in all and lovers without number. Hers was the age of bolters, and Idina was the most celebrated of them all. Her father was the eighth Earl De La Warr. In a society that valued the antiquity of families and their money, hers was as old as a British family could be (eight hundred years earlier they had followed William the Conqueror from Normandy and been given enough land to live on forever . . . another ancestor, Lord De La Warr, rescued the starving Jamestown colonists in 1610, became governor of Virginia, and gave his name to the state of Delaware). Her mother's money came from "trade"; Idina's maternal grandfather had employed more men (85,000) than the British army and built one third of the world's railroads. Idina's first husband was a dazzling cavalry officer, one of the youngest, richest, and best-looking of the available bachelors, with "two million in cash." They had a seven-story pied-à-terre on Connaught Place overlooking Marble Arch and Hyde Park, as well as three estates in Scotland. Idina had everything in place for a magnificent life, until the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand caused the newlyweds the world they'd assumed would last forever to collapse in less than a year. Like Mitford's Bolter, young Idina Sackville left her husband and children. But in truth it was her husband who wrecked their marriage, making Idina more a boltee than a bolter. Soon she found a lover of her own -- the first of many -- and plunged into a Jazz Age haze of morphine. She became a full-blown flapper, driving about London in her Hispano-Suiza, and pursing the boundaries of behavior to the breaking point. British society may have adored eccentrics whose differences celebrated the values they cherished, but it did not embrace those who upset the order of things. And in 1918, just after the Armistice was signed, Idina Sackville bolted from her life in England and, setting out with her second husband, headed for Mombasa, in search of new adventure. Frances Osborne deftly tells the tale of her great-grandmother using Idina's never-before-seen letters; the diaries of Idina's first husband, Euan Wallace; and stories from family members. Osborne follows Idina from the champagne breakfasts and thé dansants of lost-generation England to the foothills of Kenya's Aberdare mountains and the wild abandon of her role in Kenya's disintegration postwar upper-class life. A parade of lovers, a murdered husband, chaos everywhere -- as her madcap world of excess darkened and crumbled around her.
|
||||||
Please Log in to Rate these Book Reviews
I found this book overrated. I found Idina Sackville more pathetic than "intoxicating" (as one review said). Perhaps because I am familiar with the era I didn't find her story very compelling. For a book about the murder of Lord Erroll, I would recommend "White Mischief."
Well written biography of a woman whose exploits were immortalized by writers and artists. She was considered a bolter----a woman who broke the rules and fled her marriage. Good information about women and divorce in Edwardian London and also the settling of whites in Kenya. Also explores the pain she had with five marriages and for someone to really love her. I would recommend this one.
Book Wiki
People/Characters
Idina Sackville (Primary Character)
Genres:
- Biographies & Memoirs >> Specific Groups >> Women
- Biographies & Memoirs >> Leaders & Notable People >> Rich & Famous
- History >> World >> General
- History >> Europe >> England >> General
- History >> Africa >> General
- History >> Africa >> Kenya