Idina Sackville - the woman who scandalised 1920s Society and became White Mischief’s famous seductress.
Inspiration for Nancy Mitford’s character THE BOLTER, played by Garbo in A Woman of Affairs, painted by Sir William Orpen, a muse to the fashion designer Molyneux and photographed by Cecil Beaton, Idina Sackville went on to divorce a total of five times, yet died with a photograph of her first love by her bed.
Even thirty years after her death, Sackville’s life was so scandalous that it was kept a secret from her great-granddaughter. Her struggle to reinvent her life with each new marriage left her with one husband murdered, and branded her the ‘high priestess’ of White Mischief’s bed-hopping Happy Valley in Kenya. She became renowned for her powers as a seductress and was rumoured to have had ‘lovers without number’.
Frances Osborne draws on family letters and diaries to explore the moving tale of betrayal and heartbreak behind her great grandmother’s road to scandal and return, painting a dazzling portrait of high society in the early twentieth century.