Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature: 1939-51 by D.J. Taylor

Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature: 1939-51 Reviews

• 
  David

  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. The Lost Girls: Love and Literature in Wartime London by D.J. Taylor presents the lives of some of these young women who attached themselves to these older artists and enjoyed the good life, at least for a time.
  
  Ranging from Bloomsbury and Soho to Cairo and the couture studios of Schiaparelli and Hartnell, the Lost Girls would inspire the work of artists and writers like 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.
• 
  Bill Kupersmith

  “The Lost Girls” were the young women, editorial staff, mistresses and sometimes wives for Cyril Connolly, the editor of Horizon, an influential literary and cultural magazine in England during and immediately after the Second World War. They were mostly strikingly beautiful, uninhibited, free spirits, whose friends and lovers included everybody from penniless artists to wealthy aristocrats, alternatively dining at the Ritz and sleeping in flea-infested bed-sits. The best known was Sonia Brownell, who married George Orwell on his deathbed and became his literary executor. Janetta Woolley at 17 shared with Connolly a tour of France, “like Verlaine and Rimbaud” in an Armstrong Siddeley touring car, that he recalled in his wartime memoir The Unquiet Grave: “For an angora pullover, for a red scarf, for a beret and some brown shoes I am bleeding to death; my heart is as dry as a kidney. Peeling off the kilometres to the tune of ‘Blue Skies’, sizzling down the long black reaches of Nationale Sept, the plane trees going sha-sha-sha through the open window, the windscreen yellowing with crushed midges, she with the Michelin beside me, a handkerchief binding her hair.”
  
  That passage brought to mind a quotation from Samuel Johnson: “If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.” From the photographs, Jannetta was a more than pretty woman and an Armstrong Siddeley vastly preferable to a post chaise, but the expression “with no reference to futurity” describes perfectly how they lived. Sonia became the virtual editor of Horizon for the indolent Connolly, and Lys Lubbock his editorial assistant and de facto spouse for years. Their group included Barbara Skelton, mistress of Peter Quennell who married and divorced both Connolly and the publisher George Weidenfeld (that’s one way to get your novel published), as well as an affair with King Farouk. Also Jean Bakewell, Connolly’s first wife, and Diana Witherby. One should note that most of their surnames keep changing.
  
  From a contemporary post-feminist point of view, we are likely to see these women as victims of sexism and male exploitation. None of them had university educations or high-paying positions. They spoke like minor characters in an Evelyn Waugh novel: “Disparagement was conveyed in Edwardian nursery-talk: ‘beastly’, awful’, ‘ghastly’, maddening’, madly’ (to Janetta the sight of people falling over in the winter slush was ‘madly dangerous’), ‘desperately’ (Barbara’s ‘desperately depressed’ of ‘desperately dejected’); a pressing personal dilemma – the arrival of one boyfriend while another was still on the premises – might be described as a ‘pickle’; the death of a close friend or a major trauma might be greeted with the comment that ‘I minded most frightfully.’”
  
  But after finishing this book practically non-stop, I found I admired these women very much. Though they did not have the kind of paper credentials we pursue, they were the very literary history we endeavor to understand. They talked like characters in Evelyn Waugh novels because they inspired characters in his novels, and Anthony Powell’s and George Orwell’s 1984 in the case of Sonia, It’s not surprising that Sonia could serve as the real editor of Horizon, working in that editorial office was a far better humanistic education than most university BAs these days can claim. The photographs at the back of this book are utterly touching, especially the young Janetta and Sonia and Lys in the Horizon office. These women deserve to be remembered for their services to literature.
• 
  Tania

  The subjects were interesting, but after reading this, I still don't feel I got to know any of them.
• 
  Judy

  I came to this book with quite high hopes, despite a couple of Goodreads friends saying they had found it disappointing. I'm glad to have read it, but it didn't live up to my expectations overall, although some sections were fascinating and I would still read more by
  D.J. Taylor.
  
  Books by Taylor that I'd previously liked include his biographies of Thackeray (just realised I must have read that one pre-joining Goodreads in 2007, which is a scary thought!) and Orwell. Lost Girls has an Orwell link, since it centres on four women who were involved in different ways with Cyril Connolly and Horizon during the Second World War, including Sonia Brownell, who became Orwell's second wife.
  
  My main problem with this group biography that it's quite rambling. I started off listening to the book on Audible, but found it impossible to keep track, so switched to Kindle. I think it would be easier to follow if there were longer sections on each of the women who are ostensibly Taylor's main subjects, Lys Lubbock, Sonia Brownell, Barbara Skelton and Janetta Parlade, and also if each of them were introduced in more detail at the outset.
  
  I say "ostensibly", because it's hard to get away from a feeling that Taylor's main interest is in Cyril Connolly rather than the women who were associated with him in different ways. All the women (except perhaps Skelton) remain rather shadowy figures, and we tend to see them through the eyes of others, while Connolly's larger-than-life, awkward personality comes across vividly. The "lost girls" are also all referred to by their first names, while all the men are referred to by their surnames. This gives a somewhat unbalanced feeling, even though it would admittedly be hard to use surnames for the women throughout because of numerous name changes.
  
  I do feel Lost Girls gets better as it goes on, with the later sections on Skelton and Brownell being especially strong. For me, the book really comes alive in its descriptions of Horizon, its recreation of the Blitz atmosphere and its lovingly-related gossipy accounts of particular relationships and incidents. But it falters when it falls into over-long attempts to generalise on why the four women all fall into the category of "lost girls".
  
  Lastly, my favourite part of the book was possibly the fictional sketch at the start, based around a drinks evening given by Connolly and the Horizon staff. I think I would probably like Taylor's fiction, so may give that a try next.
  
• 
  Maine Colonial

  Taylor’s description of the literary world of London in the 30s and 40s feels claustrophobic and practically incestuous, considering the bed-swapping among a the regulars of such a small circle of writers, publishers, and their lovers. Taylor focuses on the writer and publisher Cyril Connolly and four young young, upper-class women who were minimally employed in this world, but maximally used as sexual conquests.
  
  I have long had an interest in some of the authors who incorporate fictional treatments of this world in their novels, like Nancy Mitford and Anthony Powell. I thought I’d be fascinated to read about the real-life people who inspired some of their characters, but it didn’t turn out that way. This is such a well-researched and detailed treatment that it illuminated what felt to me like sadly limited lives of the four young women. These four beautiful women went man to man and seemed to be defined by their relationships, not by themselves. It was depressing to read.
  
  American readers who are not already familiar with literary London and English society of this period may feel overwhelmed by the flood of names and relationships.
• 
  Alwynne

  I ended up skim-reading this one, I liked the idea of a group biography dealing with literary women in a particular era/setting but D.J. Taylor somehow managed to suck the life out of his subject-matter, the writing was so dull and uninspired, although I'd be interested in finding out more about writer and socialite Barbara Skelton and I'm tempted to track down some of her work.
• 
  Nancy Kennedy

  In his book, Mr. Taylor recounts the lives of a constellation of young women who were pulled into the orbit of the literary lions of WWII London. At the center was Cyril Connolly, bon vivant and publisher of Horizon, a literary magazine that published many of the day's great writers. Some of the women worked there, some were in romantic relationships with the men, and some did both.
  
  I have to admit, I'd never heard of Connolly or Horizon, but I do like reading about authors and editors. This is clearly a book by a British author, as I encountered terms and ideas that I didn't readily understand, unless I really looked hard at the context. But that isn't a deterrent either. I'm an Anglophile at heart.
  
  As I suspected, I found myself interested when Mr. Taylor talked about the authors -- Orwell, Maugham, Waugh, Mitford -- but my attention drifted for most of the book, which is, of course, about the young women. It was sad that in the time period, intelligent, ambitious women had virtually no path to success on their own merits. As one person in the book noted, the men were happy to have these women around, because they knew they'd never be in competition with them.
  
  The women are said to be chic, glamorous and bohemian. Yes, they were single in the city, working in an enviable industry, and free to live life as they chose (somewhat). But what I saw as I read was that they were conventional women wanting to live a settled life with a man who loved them completely. They fell into and out of relationships, fought with their lovers, had abortions, married unsuitable men who cheated on them, divorced and tried again. Toward the end of their lives, some lived in penury, succumbed to alcoholism or died friendless. I just couldn't celebrate their lives.
  
  Toward the end of his book, Mr. Taylor says "any attempt to label them ought to be resisted." But throughout the book, he employs the Lost Girl label to explain their lives. Although he tries to differentiate the women, that label kept pulling me out of their stories and seeing them as a single, pitiful lot. The label "Lost Girl" also does no favor to a reader who is trying to imagine the lives of young women. Not girls! I guess titles sell books, but I'm tired of women being reduced to the dismissive "girls." Bomb girls, fly girls, land girls, etc. I've been researching the American suffragists, who, unlike the British women who pursued the vote, did not embrace the label "suffragette," a diminutive that made light of their fight.
  
  Any woman is going to suffer in comparison with the suffragists, but I just can't see any reason to get excited about these peripheral figures. Of all of them, Sonia Brownell could have made something of herself, as she was basically the publisher of the magazine while Connolly flitted around the globe. But then she marries George Orwell and instead becomes nothing more than a literary executor. I wish she had done something with her career instead. This week's New York Times magazine ran an article about Mary-Kay Wilmers, who has been editor of the London Review of Books since 1992. Could Sonia Brownell have become a Mary-Kay Wilmers? Probably not, given the gender discrimination of the time, but surely some determined women broke through the barriers. I'd like to read about them.
• 
  Laurie

  From about 1939 to 1950, a literary magazine called “The Horizon” ran. It employed many of the best talents of the day, as well as a loose group of young women for doing the everyday donkey work. During this time, many relationships formed and broke in a sort of incestuous web (Lucien Freud, the painter, was involved with three of the girls). In the center of this web sat Cyril Connolly, the owner of “The Horizon”. He had relationships with most of the girls, whether it be romantic, sexual, or simply business. These girls were bright, good looking, and chafing at the restrictions placed being placed back on women now that the war was over. They hadn’t had an easy time during the war, and most counted on men to provide them with dinners and gifts, going between their falling-down flats and the most expensive restaurants in town. They stood somewhere between the flappers of the 20s and the hippies of the 60s. Lys Lubbock, Barbara Skelton, Sonia Brownell, Janetta Parlade, and others, stood to make the most of their lives in the perilous time of the war and right after. They tended to be tall, skinny, and broke. Some modeled, some typed, some painted; one was the mistress of the King Farouk, and one married George Orwell.
  
  The book brings to light the intellectual parties, the world of the magazine office, the artistic milieu. The author researched the lives of the women and tells us what he learned, but the book is as much a biography of Cyril Connolly as it is of the young women. More than either, it’s a work of literary gossip, delicious if you like the writers of the era; boring at times if you don’t. Four stars.
  
• 
  Mick Meyers

  I was hoping for better things with this book,I found it tedious and didn't care for any of the people involved.also read a book about the Bloomsbury set,I think this group was a faux Bloomsbury set as for the male protagonist how on earth he got these women to run around after him let alone bed them is beyond my comprehension. while group deserved one another,I would like to read at least one book about writers and other members of the art world that were not writhing in self pity and misery and enjoy the gift God has given them.
• 
  Sharon

  I found this book to be both interesting and informative. The time period that this is set in was one where women were not given as much notice or opportunities as we are today. It’s always interesting to me to read these books and to find out the struggles that women had to go through.
• 
  Jan Edwards

  Bought for research.
  
  Some interesting snippets hidden in there but its a stodgily presented, and in parts frankly pompous, narrative. It was not helped by the kerning and leading that made for cramped fonts. A hard slog.
• 
  Terry

  I find it difficult to rate this book, which I found alternately tedious and fascinating. I suspect this is because I was unfamiliar with its characters and context and the introductory sections of the book were inadequate to address my ignorance. Repeatedly confused and confounded by the many actors, several of which seemed to morph into one another, I eventually paused the book to do some online research of my own. This increased my appreciation of the book and the research it had required but did little to pique more interest in its subject matter.
  
  In the end, the central focus seems to be Connolly, a not particularly attractive personality, rather than any of the so-called “lost girls.” I never could quite fathom what they saw in him, despite the author’s attempts, late in the book, to justify his charms. The women themselves are left to be described and explained chiefly via male perspectives, including that of the author. I’d be interested to read a more feminist perspective, including closer examination of the women’s professional ambitions in an era in which those were still seriously constrained.
  
  Frankly, had I known more about the subject matter, I’m not sure I would have chosen this book to read. In retrospect, I’m glad I did. It filled in some gaps and expanded my knowledge about the period, provoked some interesting questions, and re-awakened interest in figures like George Orwell. It also explains, at least to some degree, a trend toward a sort of “lost girls” theme in the popular fiction of the 1950s to early 1970s. To that end, it was well worth the read.
• 
  Kerri

  I’ve tried for awhile now to slog my way through this book, and I’m finally calling it. I rarely DNF a book—maybe five in my life—but I just can’t with this. I was immediately put off by the fact that the author seems to assume we know all of the players in this story, but short of two or three, I was at a loss. Silly me for thinking I could jump in and enjoy this as an uninformed reader. Beyond that, even with the Cast List at the beginning, I still had a hard time keeping track of everyone. The author seems to want to focus on the four “mains”, but then constantly refers to other women, and it’s often hard to know if these are relevant enough to pay attention to, or just passing characters. I picked this up because I enjoy stories, both fictional and real, that take place during WWII; tales of the Greatest Generation. This might have a great story at it’s heart, but I just couldn’t find it.
• 
  Jim Jones

  Not sure how the author successfully pitched this book to his publisher, but for me it was a bust. Cyril Connelly, a writer/editor to whom all these Lost Women are associated, is all but unknown in the US and certainly not what I would call one of the literary greats of the 1940’s. There are brief appearances by the big guns—Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, and George Orwell, but not enough to save us from the tediousness of reading about nobodies behaving badly. These women seem about as shallow and lost as Connelly, their leader. People of the time described them as “art tarts,” which is pretty much what I felt about them by the end of this book. How about instead we get a book about 1940’s women writers like Antonia White and Nancy Mitford, who were also part of this circle? It would have been so much more interesting!
• 
  Marcella

  This is like a gossip column from the 40s, except well-researched and supported by the dramatic letters that everyone wrote to everyone else.
  
  I enjoyed it, I found it fun to read personal details of the lives of women who would have been big on Insta if they were around today. In fact, they were all fairly normal people; some were more engaged in drama than others, but they all seemed to be semi-resiliant young women with intense social lives and a willingness to try out unusual situations that came their way. The book focuses primarily on their lives in the 1940s and 50s, but had a brief section on "the rest of their lives," which were mostly bland and uneventful as far as I can tell.
• 
  Helena Eatock

  Reading in 2023 there doesn’t really appear to be anything groundbreaking about the Lost Girls’ desire for autonomy… given they were privileged enough to understand - and be exposed to - the trappings of ‘high society’. The author even implies that they cannot be labelled feminists. If anything, the amusing tales Taylor shares deconstruct privilege and power… the figure of Connolly is challenging for this reason (i.e. did he really enrich their lives or was he just a pathetic pervert exerting power)
• 
  Michael

  Taylor writes an engaging biography of four young women involved in the professional and social circle of Cyrill Connolly and the Horizon literary magazine during and after the Second World War. The women themselves are fascinating and it's an illuminating view of a period of literary history I knew little about but there's perhaps an essay's worth of writing here spread out over a book.
• 
  Sevelyn

  DJ Taylor never disappoints. Fascinating exploration of four influential women trying to be free while not quite being permitted to do so. Endless cocktails consumed, endless gallons of petrol burned on roads during their escapades. Breakups, affairs, tears, and some shattered dishes. They live on in literature. Readable, interesting book.
• 
  Darla Ebert

  This book was a complete revelation, sadly the term "lost girls" applies in several lurid ways, the term "of loose morals" is the most apt. Over over the behavior of these World War 2 women shock over and over by their louche ways and headlong aim at living in a way that was scandalous, and still should be.
  Thinking the book would be a period piece, I bought it and was immediately unsettled. There are no overt details, thankfully.
• 
  Sarah

  Well written and beautifully narrated, The Lost Girls shows a fascinating series of relationships from the focus of the women of Cyril Connolly’s literary circle. Though it can be a bit confusing because of the sheer number of people in the stories, it’s well-done.
• 
  Gina Dalfonzo

  The book is well-researched and well-written. As for the subjects, well, it's not the author's fault that they're so unappealing. I don't think Connolly had a single redeeming feature, and a lot of the people around him weren't much better. 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4.
• 
  Karen

  Maybe a 3. I ended up reading only about half the book. Interesting idea, but the details of these women were just not interesting enough to hold my attention for the entire book. It was an interesting time for the literary world though.
• 
  Nancy Kennedy

  In his book, Mr. Taylor recounts the lives of a constellation of young women who were pulled into the orbit of the literary lions of WWII London. At the center was Cyril Connolly, bon vivant and publisher of Horizon, a literary magazine that published many of the day's great writers. Some of the women worked there, some were in romantic relationships with the men, and some did both.
  
  I have to admit, I'd never heard of Connolly or Horizon, but I do like reading about authors and editors. This is clearly a book by a British author, as I encountered terms and ideas that I didn't readily understand, unless I really looked hard at the context. But that isn't a deterrent either. I'm an Anglophile at heart.
  
  As I suspected, I found myself interested when Mr. Taylor talked about the authors -- Orwell, Maugham, Waugh, Mitford -- but my attention drifted for most of the book, which is, of course, about the young women. It was sad that in the time period, intelligent, ambitious women had virtually no path to success on their own merits. As one person in the book noted, the men were happy to have these women around, because they knew they'd never be in competition with them.
  
  The women are said to be chic, glamorous and bohemian. Yes, they were single in the city, working in an enviable industry, and free to live life as they chose (somewhat). But what I saw as I read was that they were conventional women wanting to live a settled life with a man who loved them completely. They fell into and out of relationships, fought with their lovers, had abortions, married unsuitable men who cheated on them, divorced and tried again. Toward the end of their lives, some lived in penury, succumbed to alcoholism or died friendless. I just couldn't celebrate their lives.
  
  Toward the end of his book, Mr. Taylor says "any attempt to label them ought to be resisted." But throughout the book, he employs the Lost Girl label to explain their lives. Although he tries to differentiate the women, that label kept pulling me out of their stories and seeing them as a single, pitiful lot. The label "Lost Girl" also does no favor to a reader who is trying to imagine the lives of young women. Not girls! I guess titles sell books, but I'm tired of women being reduced to the dismissive "girls." Bomb girls, fly girls, land girls, etc. I've been researching the American suffragists, who, unlike the British women who pursued the vote, did not embrace the label "suffragette," a diminutive that made light of their fight.
  
  Any woman is going to suffer in comparison with the suffragists, but I just can't see any reason to get excited about these peripheral figures. Of all of them, Sonia Brownell could have made something of herself, as she was basically the publisher of the magazine while Connolly flitted around the globe. But then she marries George Orwell and instead becomes nothing more than a literary executor. I wish she had done something with her career instead. This week's New York Times magazine ran an article about Mary-Kay Wilmers, who has been editor of the London Review of Books since 1992. Could Sonia Brownell have become a Mary-Kay Wilmers? Probably not, given the gender discrimination of the time, but surely some determined women broke through the barriers. I'd like to read about them.
• 
  Holly

  Young girls in London working for a magazine during WWII. They’re aristocratic beauties looking for adventure. They hung out (and had sex with) some famous people of the day...Lucian Freud, George Orwell and King Farouk.