This is the first biography of Ettie, Lady Desborough, Edwardian chatelaine, loyal courtier and the most unfailingly positive woman who ever lived. The sturdiest of oaks would have bowed beneath blows that left unbent her patrician backbone. Profoundly Christian, she believed that happiness was a duty to the creator. Ettie's “stubborn gospel of joy”, as Cynthia Asquith called it, was handed down to her eldest son, Julian Grenfell, who described trench warfare as “the best fun one ever dreamed of ... a big picnic”. Happiness for Ettie and her set was, as Richard Davenport-Hines shows in this wonderful and sad book, the only acceptable approach to life.

Born in 1867 and orphaned by 1870, Ettie was raised by loving grandmothers who had both died by the time she was 13. Her earliest memory was of simultaneously hearing the sound of crying and tasting the sweetness of chocolate; the combination of pain and its sedative is typical of Ettie's response to tragedy.

Her paternal grandfather was the 11th earl of Westmorland; her mother, Lady Adine Cowper, was the granddaughter of Emily Lamb, whose brother William, Lord Melbourne, had been Queen Victoria's favourite prime pinister. Ettie was a Whig; she was, in fact, the last of the Whig hostesses. She even spoke like a Whig, with the same cliquey drawl employed 100 years earlier by Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire where “yellow” is “yella” and “cucumber”, “cowcumber”. The Cowper family carried a strain of melancholy that Ettie apparently mastered as a child by an act of will but it would dog Julian, despite her injunction that her boys walk with “straight sunny eyes...happily and healthily into their bright lives”.

Had she not, as Asquith said, made “a rather stupid marriage” to Willie Grenfell, Ettie “might have been one of the most considerable women of her time”. The advice of her cousin Mabel was, “If you do not absolutely hate him I should marry him...He may be a little dull, but after all, what a comfort to be cleverer than one's husband.” Ettie was cleverer than most husbands; her friends agreed that were there to be a cabinet of women, she would be prime minister. As the trusted friend of six prime ministers, including Churchill, this is no doubt an accurate assessment of her ability. Taplow Court, her house on the Thames, became the heart of the group known as the “Souls”, consisting of politicians, such as Ettie's great friend, Arthur Balfour, and feisty wives such as Margot Asquith; the idea of the salon was to shake off upper-class Victorianism and encourage free discussion between Whigs and Tories alike.

Times Archive, 1952: Lady Desborough by Osbert Sitwell

Her love and understanding of people was in its way an artistic creation

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Ettie, so Davenport-Hines puts it, “knew little of industrial and commercial classes, and less of the labouring poor; but of the rest, she knew everything”. She also knew everyone, and it was her capacity for friendship that is so fascinating; all of Edwardian England walked down her corridors, including Wilde, Yeats, Kipling, Chesterton, John Buchan, Barrie and Sassoon.

As a mother, her insistence on happiness made her childrens' friends wilt. When they grew older, some of these friends became Ettie's devoted swains. She was possessive of her sons, particularly of Julian, who in turn loathed her league of young admirers, including Patrick Shaw-Stewart. “I didn't like the way he walked, even when he was walking away.”

Ettie's blessed world came to a dramatic end with the first world war, not least because it killed every young man she knew, including Julian and her second son, Billy, who fell within weeks of each other. Having spent most of her childhood in mourning, she refused to do so now. While being “bled to death inwardly”, as she confessed, Ettie outwardly expressed her happiness that Billy and Julian were together again and had died so “marvellously”. Her book of commemoration, Pages from a Family Journal, was circulated privately among their group and was formative in the literary depiction of the first world war. Ettie was the mother of the Lost Generation. Eleven years later her only surviving son, Ivo, was killed in a motoring accident. He “went smiling to death”, she told Ottoline Morrell, who complained that in her determination to be joyful Ettie never saw “underneath” anything.

A curious thing happened as I was reading this book. Irritation with Ettie and her set - as Lytton Strachey said, “Oh dearie me I am glad that I'm not in it! It's really fatal to be made like that” - gave way to fondness and admiration. This is what it must have been like to know Ettie, but if she is simultaneously exasperating and impressive it is because Davenport-Hines understands and loves her in the same way that her friends understood and loved her. In presenting Ettie to us once again, he has brought back another lost generation; not of young, gifted soldiers but of matriarchs: sturdy, straight-backed, utterly unique.

Ettie by Richard Davenport-Hines
Weidenfeld £25 pp464

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