Lady Ottoline's album: Snapshots and portraits of her famous contemporaries (and of herself), photographed for the most part by Lady Ottoline Morrell ... of her daughter, Julian Vinogradoff

For a quarter-century, until her death in 1938, Lady Ottoline Morrell not only was one of the greatest literary hostesses in England, but was also a skilled and devoted amateur photographer. Selected key extracts from many diaries, letters, poems, and other writings. Associated with the Bloomsbury group, her subjects include Virginia Woolf, of course, as well as Henry James Lytton Strachey, Aldous Huxley, Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Hardy, E. M. Foster,W.B.Yeats, T.S.Eliot, Ian Fleming, and many others. To supplement the pictures, the editor Carolyn Heilbrun has selected key extracts from many diaries, letters, poems, and other writings in which Lady Ottoline's guests talked about themselves and each other -- pointedly, wittily, and frankly, as might be expected from so literate a group. Lord David Cecil, the historian (and a visitor at Garsington himself in the great days), contributes a fond introduction. Lady Ottoline's Album is a delight for anyone touched by an interest in Bloomsbury or the wider scene of British cultural life between the wars, a treasure of literary nostalgia, an era caught in movement and preserved.