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An urbane attempt to offer belated autonomy to a small band of well-born, well-connected young women
The scene with which DJ Taylor begins his 26th book, Lost Girls, in which a girl enters, with some trepidation, a literary party in a house in Bloomsbury, is striking for many reasons. It is, as befits a Booker-longlisted novelist, involving and full of detail about the allotments that then took up the north side of this grand central London square, the railings taken for Spitfires, the bomb craters; it is an outsider’s view of a world in which the reader is shortly to be entirely immersed. It is interesting because the girl is fictional and the scene a composite – there is no proof that George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Lucian Freud, Peter Quennell and Cyril Connolly actually stood together in that room, the offices of the literary magazine Horizon, in the autumn of 1942. And the scene is striking, above all, because Taylor has chosen to write it from the point of view of a woman, who in turn notices the women at the party most acutely, not the famous men.
It was Quennell, poet, critic, biographer and general man-about-town, who first called Janetta Woolley, Lys Dunlap, Barbara Skelton, Sonia Brownell and a small penumbra of women like them “lost girls” and although, a few pages from the end of his book, Taylor says “any attempt to label ought to be resisted”, it is a designation he finds remarkably useful. “Lost”, he is clear, has nothing to do with moralistic Victorian put-downs. Rather it is a general “air of waywardness and loneliness”, as Quennell put it, and also of courage among a small band of good-looking, well-born, well-connected young women who for one reason and another – two world wars and the rackety, traumatised, inattentive family situations the wars left in their wake; an inchoate but powerful instinct to do something that fed their minds; an urge not to be constrained as their mothers had been – have a claim, Taylor argues, to being a missing link in the history of female emancipation between the bright young things of the late 20s and the burgeoning freedoms of the 60s. Continue reading...