This biography reveals Ottoline Morrell, London's leading literary hostess during the first three decades of the 20th century. Augustus John, the Asquiths, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf and W.B. Yeats enjoyed her hospitality and she was Bertrand Russell's mistress for many years. The book includes her lost correspondence with Strachey and Bertrand Russell's 2500 letters to her. It also throws light on her curious marriage to Philip Morrell, and offers a new perspective on Britain's artists and writers in the first quarter of the 20th century. Miranda Seymour is the author of "Ring of Conspirators: Henry James and His Literary Circle" and "The Reluctant Devil".