Frances Osborne

The woman who scandalised 1920s Society and became White Mischief's infamous seductress: Idina Sackville - the 1920’s ... said to have inspired Taylor Swift’s The Bolter

On Friday 25th May, 1934, a forty-one-year-old woman walked into the lobby of Claridge's Hotel to meet the nineteen-year-old son whose face she did not know. Fifteen years earlier, as the First World War ended, Idina Sackville shocked high society by leaving his multimillionaire father to run off to Africa with a near penniless man.

London, 1914. Two young women dream of breaking free from tradition and obligation; they know that suffragettes are on the march and that war looms, but at 35 Park Lane, Lady Masters, head of a dying industrial dynasty, insists that life is about service and duty.

The tale of Lilla, the author's great-grandmother, begins with her birth in Chefoo in China in 1882, where she lived a charmed and Bohemian expat life, the younger of a set of 'heavenly twins' from a spirited, unvictorian family.

Lilla's eventful life was to span five continents and three husbands, forming a panoramic picture of British colonial life in the Orient.

Annie Brassey was the author of one of the bestselling books of the Victorian era. When, in January 1873, her four year-old daughter, Constance, died of scarlet fever, Annie commissioned the building of a 160-foot steam-yacht in her memory.

The yacht was named ‘Sunbeam’, after Annie’s nickname for Constance, and its figurehead was a golden statue of the little girl. Annie moved her four surviving children on board – together with two thousand books – and in 1876 set off right around the world.