Julian Ottoline Morrell

Summary

Introduction

Virginia Woolf enjoyed telling Ottoline Morrell that she was going to write ‘the Great Garsington novel’, thus implying that some of the secrets and gossip behind the scenes would be made public. While we inevitably regret that the promised roman à clef never materialised, it is even more unfortunate that Garsington’s most easily overlooked, intimately involved bystander and eye-witness, Julian Morrell, never wrote hers. She willingly cooperated with biographers and editors exploring her mother’s life, or reconstructing the life and times of the famous manor house where she lived from the age of seven, even contributing prefaces when incited to do so. Similarly, she generously shared the pictures from her extensive family photo albums, but for herself, throughout her life, she preferred a more effaced profile. It must be said that it was the role to which she was used.

Julian Morrell, the only child of Ottoline and Philip Morrell, was born one of twins, and named after a nun whom Ottoline had loved and admired in her youth. She was a weakly child, a mere three pounds in weight, and not expected to survive; her brother, the bonnier, beautiful baby both parents instantly doted on, died abruptly just three days later. In the words of one of Ottoline Morrell’s biographers, ‘a clear picture emerges of a child being accommodated on the fringe of her mother’s life’. Julian likewise figures on the sidelines and in the margins of all her mother’s extended social circles; she crops up in passing in their letters, memoirs and even photographs, but she is rarely to be found at the centre or as the speaking subject. One of the rare records of Julian actually speaking is when she recites T. S. Eliot’s long poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ by heart, a feat for which she was admired by her parents, as Woolf noted. Meanwhile, she looked on, whether in the London flat in Bedford Square or at Garsington, while the foremost figures in British politics, the British and European artistic avant-garde, and a whole host of composers, socialites, dancers, refugees, exiles, conscientious objectors, journalists and highprofile philanthropists flitted in and out of her world.