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The winter of 1924: Edith Olivier, alone for the first time at the age of fifty-one, thought her life had come to an end. For Rex Whistler, a nineteen-year-old art student, life was just beginning. Together, they embarked on an intimate and unlikely friendship that would become the central relationship in both their lives, as it would remain for the next 20 years. Gradually Edith's world opened up and she became a writer. Her home, the Daye House, in a wooded corner of the Wilton estate, became a sanctuary for Whistler and his brilliant and beautiful young male friends (most of them homosexual): among them Siegfried Sassoon, Stephen Tennant and Cecil Beaton, as well as other luminaries like William Walton, John Betjeman, Winston Churchill, the Sitwells, Diana Cooper and Diana Mitford - for whom she was 'all the muses'.
Set against a backdrop of the madcap parties of the 1920s, the sophistication of the 1930s and the drama and austerity of the Second World War and with an extraordinary cast of friends and acquaintances, Anna Thomasson brings to life, for the first time, the fascinating, and curious, friendship of a bluestocking and a bright young thing.
Paperback, 536 Pages, Originally Publ. 2015, This Edition Published March 2016
Author: Anna Thomasson