“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

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...