English aristocrat, socialite and arts patron Lady Ottoline Morrell was BOTD in 1873. Born at East Court in Hampshire, she was the only daughter of Lieutenant-General Arthur Cavendish-Bentinck, Raised as a conventionally upper-middle-class woman, she was given little formal education and groomed for a successful society marriage. As a teenager, she was required to care for her mother, an obsessive invalid who insisted Ottoline occupy the same bedroom. Released by her mother’s death in 1893, she travelled to Italy, having an affair with a married doctor in Capri. Returning to London, she enrolled as an out-student at Somerville College. n 1902, she married politician Philip Morrell, with whom she had twins (one dying in infancy). They agreed to an open marriage, each pursuing affairs with others, and became prominent socialites. During World War One, they moved to Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire, offering refuge to conscientious objectors. Ottoline also hosted meetings of their left-wing artistic and literary friends, who became known as Bloomsbury Group. Their guests included Virginia Woolf, Vanessa and Clive Bell, John Maynard Keynes, David Garnett, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Vita Sackville-West and Bertrand Russell (with whom she had a five-year affair). Returning to London after the war, Ottoline hosted weekly salons, promoting the careers of artists Dora Carrington, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer, Augustus John and Jacob Epstein, and writers Siegfried Sassoon, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Thomas Hardy, T. S. Eliot, W. B Yeats and L. P. Hartley. Six feet tall, strikingly attractive and eccentrically dressed, she was often compared to Woolf, with whom she had an intense and often competitive friendship (and a brief affair). In later life, she had flings with her gardener Lionel Gomme and a young stonemason named “Tiger”. Diagnosed with mouth cancer in 1928, she underwent surgery to have her lower teeth extracted and part of her jaw removed, disguising her disfigurement with colourful scarves. She died in 1938, aged 64. She inspired a number of satirical literary portraits, notably in Huxley’s novel Chrome Yellow and Lawrence’s Women in Love, and is thought to have been one of the inspirations for the sexually frustrated protagonist in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Never considered important enough for her own film, she has been portrayed (and caricatured) in a number of Bloomsbury biopics, notably by Tilda Swinton in Derek Jarman‘s Wittgenstein, Penelope Wilton in Carrington and Suzanne Bertish in Terence Davies‘ Sassoon biopic Benediction. A collection of her writings, Ottoline, were published in 1963, and her memoirs of life at Garsington during World War One followed in 1978.