Biography Lost Girls
D. J. Taylor (Constable, £25)
‘LOST GIRLS’, a term coined by man of letters Peter Quennell, were ‘adventurous young women who flitted around London’ in the 1940s, mostly upper middle class, from fractured families, intelligent, but poorly educated, attracted to High Bohemia, peripatetic, freespirited and beautiful. D. J. Taylor focuses on four of them: Lys Lubbock, Sonia Brownell, Barbara Skelton and Janetta Woolley.
All four, he argues, deserve to be brought out of the shadow of the men—quennell, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler and others —with whom they consorted and, in particular, to be recognised as more than mere ‘handmaidens’ at the court of Cyril Connolly, who sits toad-like at the centre of this book. Connolly, editor of literary magazine Horizon, employed Lys (who looked after him devotedly for nine years) and Sonia; he was a friend and admirer of Janetta; he married Barbara.
This is good material for a group biography and makes for a highly entertaining read, even if the author doesn’t entirely succeed in making his case. When he visits Janetta, formidable in her nineties and living in an elegant flat in Cadogan Place, he finds the Lost Girls thesis loftily dismissed as ‘rather silly’. The author himself frequently acknowledges the need for qualification. He claims his subjects had an unusual ‘sense of their own autonomy’, yet the fact remains that they saw themselves as validated by the men they took up with—almost any man was better than no man, with the proviso that he could always be ditched for a better model.
The girls’ differences are as notable as their similarities. Lys comes across as sweet-natured, but a chirruping bore, and Barbara is so high-octane a personality as to cast the others into the shade. She was more than a match for Connolly when it came to selfinterest, self-pity and shameless bad behaviour. Yet you can’t help loving her. ‘Thank you very much for having us to stay. I am sorry you had to do so much work and never a complaint. So unlike me,’ she wrote to a frazzled hostess.
Group biographies are inevitably limited in their scope and the inner lives of the Lost Girls remain opaque. ‘What did Sonia want?’ asks Mr Taylor, typically. Marriage to Orwell as he lay dying of TB, it seems, although her motives are unclear. The author, and so the reader, is equally baffled by Connolly’s appeal—what made him so irresistible to women? Why were they willing to act as ‘nursery maids’? He was never, ever a bore is one answer and there was nothing a Lost Girl disliked more than being bored. Kate Hubbard