D J Taylor

Biographer D J Taylor tells the story of four women from the generation of ‘lost girls’ – the missing link between the first wave of newly liberated young women of the post-Great War era and the free-for-all of the 1960s.

Taylor says there were at least a dozen or so young women in Blitz-era London that could qualify for the title, but he concentrates on four – Lys Lubbock, Sonia Brownell, Barbara Skelton and Janetta Parlade. They were chic, glamorous and bohemian members of English literary and artistic life of the 1940s. Three had affairs with Lucian Freud, one married George Orwell, one became mistress of the King of Egypt and all were associated with the celebrated literary magazine Horizon, edited by Cyril Connolly. They had affairs with dukes, celebrity divorces and appeared in the novels of George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and Nancy Mitford.

Taylor is a novelist and a biographer. His novels include Trespass and Derby Day and his Orwell: The Life won the Whitbread Prize for Biography.