 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com | 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 Woman of Affairs, 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 fo 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’ world—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 pusing the boundaries of behavior to the breaking point. British society amy 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 moutnains 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. |
Average Customer Rating:   the bolter too much family history it first 100 pages. could have been condensed. it becomes interesting around pages 108 and book two. this is when Idina comes alive. Is this all there is? Every time I looked at the book cover, it bugged me that the author selected the subject's least flattering portrait for the most prominent spot. You'd never know from this photo that clothes hung so beautifully on Idina that a designer offered to give her his designs to wear. She looked downright frumpy in the cover photo.
The author had access to personal diaries and interviews with people who knew Idina. This shows in her exhaustive chronicle of Idina's and her cohorts' doings. As a matter of fact, the almost-daily log of Idina's and her first husband's activities were such that I wished the author would get on with it a bit; the reader already knew she had to dispense with four additional husbands before she was done.
I wished the author provided a clue about pronouncing the first husband's name: Euan. Evan? Ian? You-un? I settled on Evan.
The author did a valiant job of trying to place a higher meaning on Idina's life, with limited success. And I think Euan got off a little light in his contribution to the marital troubles. What a lightweight! The whole book - and all of its characters - put me in mind of The Great Gatsby: "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."
If I view the book as an anthropological piece, I feel it succeeds very well. Despite all of the personal diaries and interviews, however, it fails to illuminate the players' personal thoughts or motivations. I missed that.
On another level, it was like reading about the self-absorbed exploits of celebrities like Madonna, Brittany, or Paris, only several generations earlier. I can only imagine the response to Madonna's so-called "shocking" coffee table book, "Sex," by any of Idina's surviving acquaintances: A big yawn. "So fin de siecle, dahling." Kenya rocks with style! This book was the most enjoyable book I have read in some time. So much so that I have bought and read several more books which were based on the time and place of "The Bolter". I wish most of our books had HALF this style and interesting way of writing that you can't put down. FABULOUS BOOK! Wish I had been there then, well, along with many other places - life is too short! Fascinating read... An insight into the almost forgotten era of the Happy Valley set in Kenya in the early years of the 20th century. Frances Osborne's "mad dashing" style of writing conjures up a world of wealthy aristocrats rushing about, dipping in and out of a constant stream of lavish parties, with very little going on in between. It is probably hugely exaggerated but most enjoyable. Can't wait to see White Mischief! The bolter This is a fascinating book about the british upperclass from around the turn of the century,
and into the roaring 30:s when the subject of the book, lady Idina "bolted" to Kenya to create
a cattle farm. Leaving her two sons in england with their father.
I can highly recommend it. |  |
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