The winter of 1924: Edith Olivier, alone for the first time at the age of 51, thought her life had come to an end. For Rex Whistler, a 19-year-old art student, life was just beginning. Together, they embark on an intimate and unlikely friendship that would transform their lives. Gradually Edith's world opens up and she becomes a writer. Her home, the Daye House, in a wooded corner of the Wilton estate, becomes a sanctuary for Whistler and the other brilliant and beautiful younger men of her circle: among them Siegfried Sassoon, Stephen Tennant, William Walton, John Betjeman, the Sitwells, and Cecil Beaton—for whom she was "all the muses." Set against a backdrop of the madcap parties of the 1920s, the sophistication of the 1930s and the drama and austerity of World War II and with an extraordinary cast of friends and acquaintances, Anna Thomasson brings to life, for the first time, the fascinating, and curious, friendship of a bluestocking and a bright young thing.
