It is to Peter Quennell in his memoir The Wanton Chase that D.J. Taylor owes his concept of wartime London’s ‘Lost Girls’: ‘adventurous young women who flitted around London, alighting briefly here and there, and making the best of any random perch on which they happened to descend’. They were courageous, living ‘without any thought for past or future’ in that bomb-blasted city, but what most touched Quennell’s heart was ‘their air of waywardness and loneliness’. He should know: he was married to one Lost Girl (Glur) while madly, frustratedly in love with another (the high-octane Barbara Skelton) who he introduced to Cyril Connolly alongside a third, Lys Lubbock, with ultimately cataclysmic results. For it was around Connolly, man-about-town and editorial supremo of the literary phenomenon that was Horizon, that the coterie of Lost Girls orbited for a decade and more, drawn like moths to his guttering flame.
Love him or loathe him, Connolly had charisma. How else to explain the baffling depths of devotion, loyalty and long-sufferingness of the circle of beautiful, brainy and emotionally volatile girls he surrounded himself with? In order to simplify things, D.J. Taylor zones in on a hard core of four of these well-bred, rackety women, supplying off-stage glimpses of the second 11 — Glur, Anna Kavan, Joan Eyres-Monsall (but why not Diana Witherby?) — to round out the picture.
Two will be familiar from other accounts: Sonia Brownell, later Orwell, who as editorial secretary from 1945 took over the reins at Horizon, to the chagrin of many who found her intellectually pretentious and bossy, keeping the magazine afloat while Connolly took an increasingly indolent back seat; and the rapacious Barbara Skelton, whose picaresque romantic life mixed histrionic emotion and low farce in equal measure and whose own two memoirs ‘for sustained, score-settling bitchiness… are in a class of their own’, Taylor tells us.
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