The Rare and the Beautiful: How the Garman Sisters Captured the Heart of Bohemian London

by Cressida Connolly

Overview

Like the better-known Mitfords, the Garman sisters took center stage in Bohemian London during the first half of the twentieth century. Beautiful, flamboyant, and headstrong, they broke away from middle-class conventions, seducing and inspiring a generation of artists. Kathleen, an enigmatic artist's model and aspiring pianist, was the lover and, later, wife of controversial American-born sculptor Jacob Epstein. Mary married the maverick poet Roy Campbell, whose verse attack on the Bloomsbury group following Mary's affair with Vita Sackville-West was the literary scandal of the epoch. Lorna, the youngest and most beautiful of the sisters, was the lover of both the painter Lucian Freud and the poet Laurie Lee.

The Rare and the Beautiful offers the first portrait of a beguiling band of eccentric siblings who possessed an uncanny ability to turn heads, break hearts, and spark creative genius. Set against the exciting backdrop of London's decadent subculture, it evokes their extraordinary milieu of high culture, drama, and scandal.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060936716
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	08/30/2005
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.06(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.76(d)

About the Author

Cressida Connolly is the daughter of the late Cyril Connolly. Her collection of short stories, The Happiest Days, won the PEN/MacMillan Prize. She contributes reviews and arts features to many publications, including the Daily Telegraph, the Observer, and Vogue.

Read an Excerpt

The Rare and the Beautiful

How the Garman Sisters Captured the Heart of Bohemian London

---

By Cressida Connolly

Ecco

Copyright © 2005 Cressida Connolly
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0060936711

---

Chapter One

The Black Country

Walsall in the West Midlands has been called the ugliest town in the world. One visitor described it as looking like the worst of Ceausescu's Romania, only with fastfood outlets. It is notorious for its high incidence of mugging and its low property prices. Many of its shop windows are darkened by heavy steel bars. There is a pawnbroker and a mothy casino and a pedestrianized shopping street strewn with an urban confetti of cigarette butts and chewing gum.

The Garman Ryan Collection had lain all but forgotten in Walsall's old library, where it had been put on view to the public in 1974. But when it was removed to the specially built New Art Gallery in 1999, there was a spate of publicity as arts journalists and broadcasters saw the collection for the first time. Local renewal schemes followed on the heels of the gallery's success. The disused factories below the gallery began to be converted, the litter-strewn canal basin cleaned and restored. An impressive, architect-designed new bus station was built, and a shopping mall. Walsall was waking up.

The art collection at the heart of Walsall's improving image had been given to the town at the wish of one woman. Lady Epstein, nee Kathleen Garman, was born only a handful of miles from Walsall. She and her eight brothers and sisters had been a most unusual family. They valued naturalness very highly; they barely disciplined their children; they spoke their minds. The sisters wore their hair straight and long when custom called for stiff permanent waves. They liked things to look effortless. Elaborate picnics appeared, as if out of nowhere, and their houses were models of elegant simplicity in which important and valuable drawings and paintings would be propped casually against the walls. They accepted the most extraordinary coincidences as nothing less than their due.

People fell in love with them. They were lovely to be in love with, passionate, generous, beautiful. They sent secret notes at midnight and left their pillows smelling of scent. They gave presents: books of poetry, music, wildflowers. They made dramatic entrances and exits, their arms full of lilies, haunting railway stations throughout Europe, intoxicating their lovers with sudden meetings and long good-byes. On his deathbed, a former lover finished his last letter to one of the sisters with "I do not forget you ever." To the poet Laurie Lee, Lorna Garman left an indelible mark on the rest of his life, an imprint of a "dark one, her panther tread, voice full of musky secrets, her limbs uncoiling on beds of moonlight."

They sought adventure, emotional altitude. Color mattered. Their letters are full of it: the bright blue sky of the Italian Alps, the scarlet leaves of a persimmon tree, the light-saturated palette of Mediterranean France and Spain, the purple robes of a bishop at an abbey tea party, the rose-pink buildings of Tuscany, the magnificent vermilion of dahlias. To understand the Garmans, it is necessary to see that this world of color and intensity stood in sharp contrast to the dark, industrial region that they came from, in the shadow of the First World War.

Every night the sky was lit up by the flames of the blast furnaces down in the valley, and in summer the pale roses in the garden would be covered with tiny flecks of black. Soot fell like snow. Smoke from the smelting of iron stained the sky, while coal inked the earth beneath. Even the trees were darkened, and the rare black form of the peppered moth, Biston betularia, was believed to have become widespread because it could camouflage itself so well here. Not for nothing was this region, just to the northwest of Birmingham, called the Black Country. Until the late nineteenth century -- and again during the First World War, because of the burgeoning need for munitions -- the area was a hub of the iron and coal industries. There was so much iron locally that even the street curbs were made of it. Anchors and chains were sent all over the world, and the ironwork for the Crystal Palace, the Avon Suspension Bridge, Westminster Bridge, and Charing Cross railway station was made here. A local vicar wrote, apparently without irony, that the people round-about were "never more happy than when enveloped in a cloud of smoke, for then, though the rays of the natural sun be interrupted, the sun of prosperity gladdens its people."

It was here in the heart of the Black Country, to Oakeswell Hall in Wednesbury, that Walter Garman brought home his bride, in the late spring of 1897. Walter was tall and dark, with expressive eyes and arched brows. He wore a drooping mustache and a slightly melancholy look, like a Spanish don. He had already been disappointed in love when a local girl broke off her engagement to him, but his heart gradually opened to the sweetness of his new companion. Margaret Magill, Marjorie as she was called, was just twenty-one, while her husband was in his late thirties. The two had met while Marjorie was at school with three of Walter's four sisters. When she took up a post as a governess in Coventry, she went frequently to see her best friend, Mabel Garman, at Yew Tree House, Great Barr, the Garman family home, just east of Wednesbury. Mabel had three brothers, and the family rather expected Marjorie to lose her heart to one of them. But they were slightly taken aback that she chose Walter, the eldest son, as if she had blithely taken everyone's favorite chocolate when proffered the box. Much as they liked Marjorie, serene and pale and serious, with blue-gray eyes, fair skin, and long, chestnut hair, she was not a catch. Her mother was an impecunious widow, and the daughter, unlike the Garman sisters, was no beauty. But she was cultured and intelligent, gentle and kind and true ...

Continues...

---

Excerpted from The Rare and the Beautiful by Cressida Connolly Copyright © 2005 by Cressida Connolly. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---