The Lost Girls: Love and Literature in Wartime London: 1939-51 - D.J. Taylor

Written by D.J. Taylor
Read by Clare Corbett
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Published Date: 2020
Publisher: Dreamscape Media
Length: 11 hrs, 36min

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 Parlade. Chic, glamorous and bohemian, as likely to be found living in a rat-haunted maisonette as dining at the Ritz, they cut a swathe through English literary and artistic life in the 1940s. Three of them had affairs with Lucian Freud. One of them married George Orwell. Another became the mistress of the King of Egypt and was flogged by him on the steps of the Royal Palace. And all of them were associated with the decade’s most celebrated literary magazine, Horizon, and its charismatic editor Cyril Connolly.

Lys, Sonia, Barbara and Janetta had very different - and sometimes explosive personalities - but taken together they form a distinctive part of the war-time demographic: bright, beautiful, independent-minded women with tough upbringings behind them determined to make the most of their lives in a highly uncertain environment, a world of living for the moment and snatching at pleasure before it disappeared.

The Lost Girls were the product of a highly artificial environment. After it came to an end - on Horizon’s closure in 1950 - their careers wound on. Later they would have affairs with dukes, feature in celebrity divorce cases and make appearances in the novels of George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and Nancy Mitford. The last of them - Janetta - died as recently as three months ago (2019). However tiny their number, they are 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.

Original cover design.