Garsington Manor, in the village of Garsington, near Oxford, England, is a country house, dating from the 17th century. Its fame derives principally from its owner in the early 20th century, the "legendary Ottoline Morrell, who held court from 1915 to 1924". Members of the Bloomsbury Group, the aristocratic Ottoline, and her wealthy husband Philip, were friends with an array of artists, writers and intellectuals, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf and Siegfried Sassoon being among the visitors to their house. The manor was later owned by Leonard Ingrams and from 1989 to 2010 was the setting for an annual summer opera season, the Garsington Opera, which relocated to Wormsley Park in 2011. Garsington is a Grade II* listed building.
History
The manor house was built on land once owned by the son of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, and at one time had the name "Chaucers". It was constructed in the 1630s by a William Wyckham. Lady Ottoline and her husband, Philip Morrell, bought the manor house in 1913, at which time it was in a state of disrepair, having been in use as a farmhouse. They paid £8,450. Their moving in was delayed until May 1915, due to the continuing occupancy by the former tenants.
Garsington became a haven for the Morrells’ friends, including D. H. Lawrence, Siegfried Sassoon, Edward Sackville-West, Lord David Cecil, Lytton Strachey, Aldous Huxley, Mark Gertler, Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and Walter de la Mare. In 1916, they invited conscientious objectors, including Clive Bell and other members of the Bloomsbury Group, to come and work on the home farm for the duration of World War I, as civilian work classified as being of national importance was recognised as an alternative to military service. Aldous Huxley spent some time at Garsington before he wrote Crome Yellow, a book which contains a caricature based on Ottoline for which she never forgave him. His pen portrait of her, written after their first meeting in 1915, summarises the aspects of her character which both attracted and repelled; "[She] is quite an incredible creature - arty beyond the dreams of avarice and a patroness of literature and the modern. She is intelligent, but her affectation is overwhelming". Huxley was not the only one of Ottoline's friends to mock her in print. Her affair with a stonemason Lionel Gomme, known as "Tiger", who worked on the statuary at Garsington, has been cited by some critics as the basis for Lawrence's portrayal of Lady Chatterley's affair with the gamekeeper, Mellor in his novel of 1928. Lawrence portrayed her even more directly as Lady Hermione Roddice, in his novel Women in Love. The savagery of the depiction caused a decades-long breach in their friendship, and Philip Morrell threatened to sue Lawrence's publishers.
In Confidence, a short story by Katherine Mansfield, portrays the "wits of Garsington" some four years before Crome Yellow. Not everyone found the atmosphere congenial; the shy poet Cecil Day-Lewis, taken to Garsington by his tutor Maurice Bowra, found it "a tremendous ordeal" and sought refuge "slinking gloomily amongst the peacocks" in the Italianate gardens. Lytton Strachey complained that the constant coming and going of guests made work impossible: "I sit quivering among a surging mesh of pugs, peacocks, pianolas, and humans - if humans they can be called - the inhabitants of Circe's cave". David Garnett, a writer, and lover of a number of Ottoline's guests, recorded his impressions of Garsington in his autobiography; "Ottoline's pack of pug dogs trotted everywhere and added to the Beardsley quality, which was one half of her natural taste. The characteristic of every house in which Ottoline lived was its smell and the smell of Garsington was stronger than that of Bedford Square. It reeked of the bowls of potpourri and orris root which stood on every mantelpiece, side table and window-sill and of the desiccated oranges, studded with cloves, which Ottoline loved making".