BOLTER, THE(ISBN=9780307476425) 英文原版 网盘下载 pdf 免费 2025 在线 epub 电子版

　　A San Francisco Chronicle 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—Idina Sackville was the most celebrated of them all. Her

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.

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　　Frances Osborne was born in London and studied philosophy and

modern languages at Oxford University. She is the author of

Lilla’s Feast. Her articles have appeared in The Daily

Telegraph, The Times, The Independent, the Daily Mail,

and Vogue. She lives in London with her husband, a Member of

Parliament, and their two children.

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　　Chapter 1

　　Thirty years after her death, Idina entered my life like a bolt

of electricity. Spread across the top half of the front page of the

Review section of the Sunday Times was a photograph of a woman

standing encircled by a pair of elephant tusks, the tips almost

touching above her head. She was wearing a drop-waisted silk dress,

high-heeled shoes, and a felt hat with a large silk flower perching

on its wide, undulating brim. Her head was almost imperceptibly

tilted, chin forward, and although the top half of her face was

shaded it felt as if she was looking straight at me. I wanted to

join her on the hot, dry African dust, still stainingly rich red in

this black-and-white photograph.

　　I was not alone. For she was, the newspaper told me,

irresistible. Five foot three, slight, girlish, yet always dressed

for the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, she dazzled men and women alike. Not

conventionally beautiful, on account of a “shotaway chin,” she

could nonetheless “whistle a chap off a branch.” After sunset, she

usually did.

　　The Sunday Times was running the serialization of a book, White

Mischief, about the murder of a British aristocrat, the Earl of

Erroll, in Kenya during the Second World War. He was only

thirty-nine when he was killed. He had been only twenty-two, with

seemingly his whole life ahead of him, when he met this woman. He

was a golden boy, the heir to a historic earldom and one of

Britain’s most eligible bachelors. She was a twice-divorced

thirty-year-old, who, when writing to his parents, called him “the

child.” One of them proposed in Venice. They married in 1924, after

a two-week engagement.

　　Idina had then taken him to live in Kenya, where their lives

dissolved into a round of house parties, drinking, and nocturnal

wandering. She had welcomed her guests as she lay in a green onyx

bath, then dressed in front of them. She made couples swap partners

according to who blew a feather across a sheet at whom, and other

games. At the end of the weekend she stood in front of the house to

bid them farewell as they bundled into their cars. Clutching a dog

and waving, she called out a husky, “Good-bye, my darlings, come

again soon,” as though they had been to no more than a children’s

tea party.

　　Idina’s bed, however, was known as “the battleground.” She was,

said James Fox, the author of White Mischief, the “high priestess”

of the miscreant group of settlers infamously known as the Happy

Valley crowd. And she married and divorced a total of five

times.

　　IT WAS NOVEMBER 1982. I was thirteen years old and transfixed.

Was this the secret to being irresistible to men, to behave as this

woman did, while “walking barefoot at every available opportunity”

as well

　　as being “intelligent, well-read, enlivening company”? My younger

sister’s infinitely curly hair brushed my ear. She wanted to read

the article too. Prudishly, I resisted. Kate persisted, and within

a minute we were at the dining room table, the offending article in

Kate’s hand. My father looked at my mother, a grin spreading across

his face, a twinkle in his eye.

　　“You have to tell them,” he said.

　　My mother flushed.

　　“You really do,” he nudged her on.

　　Mum swallowed, and then spoke. As the words tumbled out of her

mouth, the certainties of my childhood vanished into the adult

world of family falsehoods and omissions. Five minutes earlier I

had been reading a newspaper, awestruck at a stranger’s exploits.

Now I could already feel my great-grandmother’s long, manicured

fingernails resting on my forearm as I wondered which of her

impulses might surface in me.

　　“Why did you keep her a secret?” I asked.

　　“Because”—my mother paused—“I didn’t want you to think her a role

model. Her life sounds glamorous but it was not. You can’t just run

off and . . .”

　　“And?”

　　“And, if she is still talked about, people will think you might.

You don’t want to be known as ‘the Bolter’s’ granddaughter.”

　　MY MOTHER WAS RIGHT to be cautious: Idina and her blackened

reputation glistened before me. In an age of wicked women she had

pushed the boundaries of behavior to extremes. Rather than simply

mirror the exploits of her generation, Idina had magnified them.

While her fellow Edwardian debutantes in their crisp white dresses

merely contemplated daring acts, Idina went everywhere with a jet-

black Pekinese called Satan. In that heady prewar era rebounding

with dashing young millionaires—scions of industrial

dynasties—Idina had married just about the youngest, handsomest,

richest one. “Brownie,” she called him, calling herself “Little

One” to him: “Little One extracted a large pearl ring—by everything

as only she knows how,” she wrote in his diary.

　　When women were more sophisticated than we can even imagine now,

she was, despite her small stature, famous for her seamless

elegance. In the words of The New York Times, Idina was “well known

in London Society, particularly for her ability to wear beautiful

clothes.” It was as if looking that immaculate allowed her to

behave as disreputably as she did. For, having reached the heights

of wealth and glamour at an early age, Idina fell from grace. In

the age of the flappers that followed the First World War, she

danced, stayed out all night, and slept around more noticeably than

her fellows. When the sexual scandals of Happy Valley gripped the

world’s press, Idina was at the heart of them. When women were

making bids for independence and divorcing to marry again, Idina

did so—not just once, but several times over. As one of her many

in-laws told me, “It was an age of bolters, but Idina was by far

the most celebrated.”

　　She “lit up a room when she entered it,” wrote one admirer,

“D.D.,” in the Times after her death. “She lived totally in the

present,” said a girlfriend in 2004, who asked, even after all

these years, to remain anonymous, for “Idina was a darling, but she

was naughty.” A portrait of Idina by William Orpen shows a pair of

big blue eyes looking up excitedly, a flicker of a pink-red pouting

lip stretching into a sideways grin. A tousle of tawny hair frames

a face that, much to the irritation of her peers, she didn’t give a

damn whether she sunburnt or not. “The fabulous Idina Sackville,”

wrote Idina’s lifelong friend the travel writer Rosita Forbes, was

“smooth, sunburned, golden—tireless and gay—she was the best

travelling companion I have ever had . . .” and bounded with “all

the Brassey vitality” of her mother’s family. Deep in the Congo

with Rosita, Idina, “who always imposed civilization in the most

contradictory of circumstances, produced ice out of a thermos

bottle, so that we could have cold drinks with our lunch in the

jungle.”

　　There was more to Idina, however, than being “good to look at and

good company.” She was a woman with a deep need to be loved and

give love in return. “Apart from the difficulty of keeping up with

her husbands,” continued Rosita, Idina “made a habit of marrying

whenever she fell in love . . . She was a delight to her

friends.”

　　Idina had a profound sense of friendship. Her female friendships

lasted far longer than any of her marriages. She was not a husband

stealer. And above all, wrote Rosita, “she was preposterously—and

secretly—kind.”

　　As my age and wisdom grew fractionally, my fascination with Idina

blossomed exponentially. She had been a cousin of the writer Vita

Sackville-West, but rather than write herself, Idina appears to

have been written about. Her life was uncannily reflected in the

writer Nancy Mitford’s infamous character “the Bolter,” the

narrator’s errant mother in The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold

Climate, and Don’t Tell Alfred. The similarities were strong enough

to haunt my mother and her sister, two of Idina’s granddaughters.

When they were seventeen and eighteen, fresh off the Welsh farm

where they had been brought up, they were dispatched to London to

be debutantes in a punishing round of dances, drinks parties, and

designer dresses. As the two girls made their first tentative steps

into each party, their waists pinched in Bellville Sassoon ball

dresses, a whisper would start up and follow them around the room

that they were “the Bolter’s granddaughters,” as though they, too,

might suddenly remove their clothes.

　　In the novels, Nancy Mitford’s much-married Bolter fled to Kenya,

where she embroiled herself in “hot stuff . . . including horse-

whipping and the aeroplane” and a white hunter or two as a husband,

although nobody is quite sure which ones she actually married. The

fictional Bolter’s daughter lives, as Idina’s real daughter did, in

England with her childless aunt, spending the holidays with an

eccentric uncle and his children. When the Bolter eventually

appears at her brother’s house, she looks immaculate, despite

having walked across half a continent. With her is her latest

companion, the much younger, non-English-speaking Juan, whom she

has picked up in Spain. The Bolter leaves Juan with her brother

while she goes to stay at houses to which she cannot take him. “

‘If I were the Bolter,’ ” Mitford puts into the Bolter’s brother’s

mouth, “ ‘I would marry him.’ ‘Knowing the Bolter,’ said Davey,

‘she probably will.’ ”

　　Like the Bolter, Idina famously dressed to perfection, whatever

the circumstances. After several weeks of walking and climbing in

the jungle with Rosita, she sat, cross-legged, lo...

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媒体评论

　　“Engrossing and beautifully written. . . . [An] affecting

story.” —San Francisco Chronicl

　　“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

书籍介绍

A San Francisco Chronicle 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—Idina Sackville was the most celebrated of them all. Her 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.