Lost Girls

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Lost girls' was the name given by the writer Peter Quennell to the young women at large in Blitz-era literary London. Lost Girls concentrates on just four: Lys Lubbock, Sonia Brownell, Barbara Skelton and Janetta Woolley. Chic, glamorous and bohemian, they cut a swathe through English cultural life in the 1940s. One of them married George Orwell. Another became the mistress of the King of Egypt. All of them were associated with the decade's most celebrated literary magazine, Horizon, and its charismatic editor Cyril Connolly.Bright, beautiful, independent-minded women with tough upbringings behind them, the Lost Girls were creatures of the volatile landscape through which they moved. Theirs was the world of the buzz bomb, the cocktail party behind blackout curtains, the severed hand on the pavement, the rustle of a telegram falling through the letter-box, the hasty farewell to another half who might not ever come back, of living for the moment and snatching at pleasure before it disappeared. But if their trail runs through vast acreages of war-time life then, in the end, it returns to Connolly and his amorous web-spinning, in which all four of them regularly featured and which sometimes complicated their emotional lives to the point of meltdown.After Horizon's closure in 1950 the Lost Girls went on to have affairs with dukes, feature in celebrity divorce cases and make appearances in the novels of George Orwell, Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh. However tiny their number, they remain a genuine missing link between the first wave of newly-liberated young women of the post-Great War era and the Dionysiac free-for-all of the 1960s. Hectic, passionate and at times unexpectedly poignant, this is their story.