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The Bolter
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Original price was: $17.00.$10.99Current price is: $10.99.
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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • AN O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE #1 TERRIFIC READ • In an age of bolters—women who broke the rules and fled their marriages—one woman was the most celebrated of them all.• “Even today Lady Idina Sackville could get tongues wagging.”—NPR
“Taylor Swift might count Lady Sackville among her muses. Swift’s fans…have linked Idina to The Bolter, a song on the record-breaking album, The Tortured Poets Department”—Tatler
Idina Sackville’s relentless affairs, wild sex parties, and brazen flaunting of convention shocked high society and inspired countless writers and artists, from Nancy Mitford to Greta Garbo. But Idina’s compelling charm masked the pain of betrayal and heartbreak.
Now Frances Osborne explores the life of Idina, her enigmatic great-grandmother, using letters, diaries, and family legend, following her from Edwardian London to the hills of Kenya, where she reigned over the scandalous antics of the “Happy Valley Set.” Dazzlingly chic yet warmly intimate, The Bolter is a fascinating look at a woman whose energy still burns bright almost a century later.
“Sackville’s passion lights up the page.” —Entertainment Weekly • “An engaging, definitive final look back at those naughty people who, between the wars, took their bad behavior off to Kenya and whose upper-class delinquency became gilded with unjustified glamour.” —Financial Times • “Intoxicating.” —People
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Categories: Women Writers
Product name:
The Bolter
Price:
Original price was: $17.00.$10.99Current price is: $10.99.
lulu –
Hadn’t read it yet but seems a good buy
john r moss –
Hard read,
Avalon –
A wonderful account of Idina Sackville as told by her great grand daughter. Riveting reading.
Martin Mahadevan –
This is another biography of one of the sparkling figures of the Happy Valley set which makes on the whole good entertainment despite some lengths. For me the really breathtaking thing is the utter irresponsisibily, carelessness and ruthlessness of the rich and super-rich in puirsuit of the latest thrill then and now. Idina Sackvilles and her first husband’s (Euan Wallace) lives was seemingly an endless round of lumcheons and dinners at Claridge’s, the Ritz or the Dorchester or the other Ritz in Paris and ordering some new dresses at Lavin’s. Their two children weren’t really part of their lives, but that of nursemaids and nannies as not to get in their way and spoill their fun. Idina and Euan built themselves an enormous country seat in Scotland for an astrronomical sum that they barely ever visited. Another pastime of Idina was speeding around London in her Hispano-Suiza, preferably drunk or drugged, as did another illustrious member of the set, Raymond de Trafford, who ran over a cyclist and couldn’t care less. Naturally she was also in for the latest craze of the early 20s, bathing in Champagne.
It would have been nice to compare their lives with that of a pitworker from one of the Scottish coalmines, from which Euan Wallace derived his fortune. And a look at the overcrowded slum tenements which were good enough for the miner’s families.
Naturally Euan Wallace became later a Tory politician to see to it that nothing changed and the pitworkers knew their places.
And the author herself is probably one of the best examples of the self-perpetuating power of the British upper-crust as the granddaughter of fun-loving Idina and the wife of the current British Chancellor of the Exchequer. They stand for nothing but the conservation and extension of their endless privileges and feeding the crumbs of their wealth to the plebs. And the plebs likes it that way because they are perfectly dumbed-down and brain-washed by the media of the likes of Rupert Murdoch. Carry on!
Carol Bursey –
Fascinating biography of a wonderfully outlandish woman and the outrageous exploits of the British upper classes
Ferro –
This is both an entertaining biography and also a spin-off book capitalising on the success of “White Mischief”. Lady Idina Sackville was generally known as a rampant promiscuous toff, one who enjoyed creating scandal and being the centre of attention, like many of her selfish and narcissistic peers in the Happy Valley set. She came from a type of people with more money than sense, the wealthy and priveleged upper class of London who generally behaved in an extremely immature and immoral way, while simultaneously considering themselves the best of British society. They pumped out heirs to fulfill societal expectations but proved to be too selfish and inept to even bother with parenting. This is the perception at least.
Yet this carefully researched and reconstructed bit of detective work by her great grand-daughter, pieced together from family accounts, old letters and diaries, reveals a much more layered and multi-faceted person. Idina nursed a series of deep hurts and was desperately driven to seek affection in all the wrong places. Ultimately she was essentially a remarkable survivor, capable of great loyalty and affection to those near her, and one who found a way to thrive in the spotlight as well as endure a highly unstable private life, and the ravages of those who abandoned and betrayed her.
The first part provides an interesting glimpse into WWI London and a revealing expose of the social mores of the day. I had not realized that infidelity was so accepted in the early 1900’s or that the family unit was already so degraded. The hedonistic mindset that marked -many would say caused- the decline of the British Empire was not exactly a product of Kenya, it was a transplantation of prevalent English upper class lifestyles into an exotic and unfettered setting.
The most enjoyable parts of the book capture the romance and pioneer spirit of the British settlers- the beauty and charm of Africa in the old colonial days. The second half of this work branches off to suddenly explore the largely unrelated lives of Idinas children and grandchildren in order for the author to immortalize her own family history. For this reason it is a bit disjointed in overall structure but is nevertheless a fairly interesting read.
Mary Whipple –
Using documents and photographs that have never before been available, along with private diaries and interviews with some of those who knew Idina Sackville, author Frances Osborne creates a lively, readable, and well researched biography which attempts to understand what aspects of Idina Sackville’s early family life might have helped create a person so flamboyant, sexually adventurous, and hedonistic that she became world famous. For over thirty years, Idina Sackville had done exactly what she wanted, becoming famous on three continents for her outrageous sexual exploits, her nudity at parties, the bed-hopping games she invented for house parties, her drinking, and even her occasional experimentation with drugs. Her friends, especially in Kenya’s Happy Valley, equally amoral, participated in several shootings or attempted shootings, the highly publicized murder of one of Idina’s ex-husbands, the subsequent trial for that murder involving another member of Happy Valley, several suicides, and cases of drug addiction, one of them leading to death.
Beginning with Idina’s earliest background, the author, Idina’s great-granddaughter, explores the family history. Idina’s father, Gilbert Sackville, the 8th Earl of De La Warr, possessed an eight hundred-year-old title but very little income. Her mother, Muriel Brassey, was the non-aristocratic granddaughter of an unbelievably successful man of trade. After a few years of marriage, when Muriel tired of paying for her husband’s indiscretions, however, she shocked society by suing for divorce, almost unheard of among the aristocracy. This, combined with her involvement in socialist causes and the suffrage movement further alienated her from “polite” society and tainted the futures of her children. The author believes that this had a major impact on the future course of Idina’s life.
Marriages among the aristocracy were frequently marriages of convenience, allowing both husbands and wives to take lovers, often from among their married friends. Married lovers, unlike lovers who were single, did not expect to divorce their spouses to marry their lovers, thereby preserving everyone’s family assets – and if a pregnancy resulted, the child could be incorporated into the woman’s already existing family. When Idina eventually met and married a wealthy, and titled, young Calvary officer, David Euan Wallace, as much of a party animal as she was, World War I intervened. Eventually, she divorced him to escape to Kenya with someone else, forced to leave her two young sons behind, though she claimed to her dying day that she loved Euan. Eventually, she would have four more marriages and divorces and would become the “undisputed Queen of Happy Valley” in Kenya, her bed referred to as “the battleground.”
A fascinating sociological study of the mores of aristocratic England and a personal study of Idina Sackville, who was both its victim and its most celebrated example, The Bolter will fascinate those interested in this period and in the unstated rules of aristocratic life. Most readers will become so involved in the story that they will probably ignore the sometimes awkward descriptions, the simple conclusions, and the possibly incorrect motivations attributed to the characters. The fact that many of these attitudes toward marriage, divorce, and the taking of lovers continues after all these years seems to prove that among the aristocracy, at least, old habits indeed die slowly.
Philip L. Tudor –
“Judge not, lest ye be judged” or “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”: The Bolter brings these statements to vivid life in a beautifully written, incredibly touching story of the life of an English aristocrat during the first half of the Twentieth Century, primarily taking place in Kenya. Idina Sackville was married and divorced numerous times and was the personification of the British aristocrats who lived in Kenya’s Happy Valley before and during the Second World War. The book starts out with the author’s mother making a scathing value judgment about Idina, who was the author’s great grandmother. Throughout Idina’s life numerous others joined in the value judgements: husband and child abandoner, free love advocate, orgy participant, husband swapper, alcohol abuser, and best friend to incredibly wealthy but also an incredibly scummy crowd. Essentially Idina’s legacy was that of a multi-time divorced amoral “slut” sitting out the WWII in incredible luxury in Kenya.
In this book, the author starts with this premise, then examines Idina’s life from birth till death in detail; and the value judgement start to fall away, Idina comes alive and literally leaps from the page. At least for me, by the end of the book, Idina became a three dimensional, very touching, and incredibly complex person whose true inner self with an immensely capable capacity to love (in a non-sexual manned) made the morals of those who judged her look positively amoral. The time, place, motivations and thoughts of the subject of the book are incredibly vivid; and at the end, I do not think any reader could close this book without being incredibly touched.
Paul Rothwell –
Totally satisfied 😁
A+++++