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Lost girls : love, war and literature 1939-1951 / D.J. Taylor.

Catalogue Information
Field name Details
Record Number 819421
ISBN 9781472126863 (hardback)
Author Taylor, D. J., (David John), 1960- author.
Title Lost girls : love, war and literature 1939-1951 / D.J. Taylor.
Publisher/Date London : Constable, 2019.
©2019
Pagination etc. xii, 387 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, portraits ; 25 cm
Bibliography, etc. note Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary Note Who were the lost girls? At least a dozen or so young women at large in Blitz-era London have a claim to this title. But Lost girls concentrates on just four: Lys Lubbock, Sonia Brownell, Barbara Skelton and Janetta Woolley. Chic, glamorous and bohemian, they cut a swathe through English cultural life in the 1940s. One of them married George Orwell. Another became the mistress of the King of Egypt. All of them were associated with the decade's most celebrated literary magazine, Horizon, and its charismatic editor Cyril Connolly. Theirs was the world of the buzz bomb, the cocktail party behind blackout curtains, the severed hand on the pavement, the rustle of a telegram falling through the letterbox, the hasty farewell to a significant other; of living for the moment and snatching at pleasure before it disappeared. But if their trail runs through vast acreages of wartime life then, in the end, it returns to Connolly and his amorous web-spinning, in which all four of them regularly featured and which sometimes complicated their emotional lives to the point of meltdown. After Horizon's closure in 1950, the lost girls went on to have affairs with dukes, feature in celebrity divorce cases and make appearances in the novels of George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, and Anthony Powell. However tiny their number, they remain a genuine missing link between the first wave of newly-liberated young women of the post-Great War era and the Dionysiac free-for-all of the 1960s. Hectic, passionate and at times unexpectedly poignant, this is their story.
Subject Women -- Great Britian -- Biography
Women -- Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 20th century
Women -- Great Britain -- History -- 20th century
World War, 1939-1945 -- Great Britain
Nineteen forties
London (England) -- Social life and customs -- 20th century
Biographies.
Shelf Location 941.084 TAYL
Catalogue Information 819421 Beginning of record . Catalogue Information 819421 Top of page .