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DJ Taylor finds intelligence as well as raciness among the women who scandalised Britain’s postwar literary set
Twenty years ago, the so-called “lost girls” of the 1940s were described by Hilary Spurling as posh but under-educated typists. Spurling’s focus was on Sonia (Brownell) Orwell, whose wartime job on a magazine gave her excellent 2002 biography its title: The Girl from the Fiction Department. DJ Taylor, who has previously written about the bright young things of the interwar years, makes a convincing case for seeing Sonia and her peers as a racier, tougher and far more intelligent group than has previously been allowed.
The “lost girls” could refer to at least a dozen or so young women at large in blitz-era London, but Taylor mainly concentrates on four: Lys Lubbock, Sonia Brownell, Barbara Skelton and Janetta Parladé, née Woolley. Chic, glamorous and bohemian, and more likely to be seen dining at the Ritz than living in a rat-infested garret, they cut a swath through English literary and artistic life in the 1940s. Three of them had affairs with Lucian Freud. One of them, as we know, married George Orwell. Continue reading...