Starred Review. Osborne's lively narrative brings Lady Idina Sackville (an inspiration for Nancy Mitford's character the Bolter) boldly to life, with a black lapdog named Satan at her side and a cigarette in her hand. Osborne (
Lilla's Feast) portrays a desperately lonely woman who shocked Edwardian high society with relentless affairs and drug-fueled orgies. Idina's story unfolds in an intimate tone thanks to the author, her great-granddaughter, who only accidentally discovered the kinship in her youth with the media serialization of James Fox's
White Mischief. Osborne makes generous use of sources and private family photos to add immediacy and depth to the portrait of a woman most often remembered as an amoral five-time divorcée: the author shows her hidden kindnesses at her carefully preserved Kenyan cattle ranch—a refuge from the later destructive Kenyan massacres. Still, Osborne unflinchingly exposes Idina's flaws—along with those of everyone else in the politely adulterous high society—while ably couching them in the context of the tumultuous times in which Idina resolved to find happiness in all the wrong places. The text, most lyrical when describing the landscapes around Idina's African residences, proves that an adventurous spirit continues to run in this fascinating family. 66 photos,
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“Engrossing and beautifully written. . . . [An] affecting story.” —
San Francisco Chronicle
“Intoxicating.” —
People “If notorious relatives make for the best dinner-party anecdotes, then Frances Osborne should be able to dine out for decades…. Enthralling.” —
The Plain Dealer “Idina Sackville . . . could have stepped out of an Evelyn Waugh satire about the bright young things who partied away their days in the ‘20s and ‘30s, and later crashed and burned. . . . Frances Osborne . . . conjure[s] a vanished world with novelistic detail and flair.” —
The New York Times “An engaging book, drawing a revealing portrait of a remarkable woman and adding humanity to her ‘scandalous’ life. . . . Ms. Osborne has succeeded in her stated aim, to write a book that ‘has in a way brought Idina back to life.’ And what a life it was.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Vibrant. . . . Osborne connects vast expanses of the dots that formed Idina’s reality: the gender inequalities in Edwardian England, the economic imperatives of colonialism, the mores of upper-class adultery, the differences between Idina’s aristocratic father . . . and her merely wealthy mother.”
—Newsday
“Intelligent, moving, and packed with exquisite detail.”
—Providence Journal
“[Idina Sackville’s] life story, speckled with the names of the rich and famous, is a miniature history lesson, bringing into sharp focus both world wars, the Jazz Age, and the colonization of Kenya. . . . Sackville’s passion lights up the page.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“[A] rumbustious and harrowing biography that takes us from London to Newport to Kenya. . . . A feast for the Anglophile.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Brilliant and utterly divine. . . . A breath of fresh air from a vanished world.”
—The Daily Beast
“
The Bolter is a biographical treat.”
—Good Housekeeping
“Fascinating. . . . Paint[s] an interesting picture of Edwardian England, its social mores and rigors giving way to the wildness of pre-depression Europe.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“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
“A sympathetic but evenhanded portrait of a woman driven by needs and desires even she didn’t understand.”
—The Columbus Dispatch
“Truly interesting. Osborne paints an enthralling portrait of upper class English life just before, during and immediately after the Great War. Frivolous, rich, sexy [and] achingly fashionable.”
—The Observer (London)
“Even today Lady Idina Sackville could get tongues wagging. . . . A lively portrait of the UK-born troublemaker, a woman who took countless lovers, raised hell in England and Africa, inspired novels by Nancy Mitford and carried around a dog she named Satan. . . . Through [Idina’s] story, we not only get a sexy and difficult-to-put-down read, we also get a good look at the shadow side of this prim and proper era and the real women who defied convention to live in it.”—Jessa Crispin, “Books We Like,” NPR
“A racy romp underpinned by some impressive research.”
—The Sunday Telegraph (London)
“Passionate and headstrong, Lady Idina was determined to be free even if the cost was scandal and ruin. Frances Osborne has brilliantly captured not only one woman’s life but an entire lost society.” —Amanda Foreman, author of
Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire
“Told very much like a novel,
The Bolter introduces readers to a world where every rule is broken and creating a scene is the latest fashion accessory.”
—The Daily Texan
“Not only is it a beautifully written, intriguing chronicle of a frenetic, privileged, and profoundly sad life, it catches a social group and the mad-cap lives they led—so luxurious, so wasted. . . . Superb.” —Barbara Goldsmith, author of
Obsessive Genius and Little Gloria. . . Happy at Last
“Drawing on family letters, Osborne’s portrait creates sympathy not for Idina’s reckless behavior but for the emotional emptiness that provoked her far-flung, self defeating yet undeniably glamorous search for love.”
—More
“Fascinating. . . . Beautifully written. . . . Frances Osborne brings the decadence of Britain’s dying aristocracy vividly to life in this story of scandal and heartbreak.”—Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of
Young Stalin and Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
“Sex, money, glamour, and scandal make Idina Sackville’s story hard to put down. What brings that story to life is the courage of an incorrigibly stylish survivor. Searching for the woman behind the legend, Osborne [gives us] a heroine impossible to resist.” —Frances Kiernan, author of
The Last Mrs. Astor and Seeing Mary Plain: A life of Mary McCarthy
