Publisher Description
Who were the Lost Girls? Chic, glamorous, and bohemian, as likely to be found living in a rat-haunted maisonette as dining at the Ritz, Lys Lubbock, Sonia Brownell, Barbara Skelton, and Janetta Parlade cut a swath through English literary and artistic life at the height of World War II. Three of them had affairs with Lucian Freud. One of them married George Orwell. Another became the mistress of the King of Egypt. They had very different—and sometimes explosive—personalities, but taken together they form a distinctive part of the wartime demographic: bright, beautiful, independent-minded women with tough upbringings who were determined to make the most of their lives in a chaotic time. Ranging from Bloomsbury and Soho to Cairo and the couture studios of Schiaparelli and Hartnell, the Lost Girls would inspire the work of George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, and Nancy Mitford. They are the missing link between the Lost Generation and Bright Young People and the Dionysiac cultural revolution of the 1960s. Sweeping, passionate, and unexpectedly poignant, this is their untold story.
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About D. J. Taylor
D.J. Taylor was born in 1960, went to Norwich School and St John’s College, Oxford, and is the author of two acclaimed biographies, Thackerary (1999), and Orwell: The Life, which won the Whitbread Biography Prize in 2003. He has written eleven novels, the most recent being The Windsor Faction (2013),joint winner of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, Derby Day (2011),long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, At the Chime of a City Clock (2010), Ask Alice (2009) and Kept: A Victorian Mystery (2006).
David is also well known as a critic and reviewer, and his other books include A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the 1980s (1989) and After the War: the Novel and England since 1945 (1993). His journalism appears in the Independent and the Independent on Sunday, the Guardian, The Tablet, the Spectator, the Wall Street Journal and, anonymously, in Private Eye. He is married to the novelist Rachel Hore. They have three sons and live in Norwich, UK.
About Clare Corbett
Clare Corbett, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, studied at the Welsh College of Music and Drama. After winning the Carlton Hobbs audition, she was chosen to be on BBC Radio. After leaving BBC she went on to narrate several children’s books, including Over the Moon, I Rule Dogsbottom School, and Boy Beware. She has transitioned into reading young adult novels, including many installments in the Doctor Who series.