offers an exclusive extract from her new literary biography
Thoughout the cold winter of 1934, Sibyl was at work on her fourth novel, A Time of Loving. The main character, Amelia Wishart, was a portrait of Ramsay MacDonald’s mistress, Eileen. Tramways, the remote Cornish house where Amelia lives with her first husband Denzil, was based on Fisters, Ottoline Morrell’s childhood home in Dorset. Denzil was taken by all Amelia’s friends to be a depiction of Eddie Sackville-West, with whom she and Blossom Garnett had both recently terminated their long-standing affairs. Urged on by ‘Sligger’ Urquhart, Goronwy Rees claimed that he himself was in fact the model for Denzil, while Sackville-West appeared only as the footman, Spittal.
Sybille’s beloved sister Victoria dominates the first part of the novel in the guise of Hester, the depressive painter, whose Mayfair flat – where in one unforgettable scene she entertains the lecherous novelist T. H. Wildbloode – was based on the Sloane Square apartment of Amelia’s friend, the cross-dressing Slade figure painter, Camilla Gentleman. The curtains came from a design by William Morris and had been copied by Amelia from Dora Carrington’s house in Wimborne Minster. Wildbloode was of course a portrait of the young H. G. Wells, with whom Hester had entered into an unwise liaison the previous autumn at a house party given by Vanessa Lytton-Duff, herself Denzil’s mistress at the time.
Gerald’s spaniel William was based on Augustus John’s beagle, Maynard. Amelia’s dress was copied from Rebecca’s ballgown at Manderley and her Alice band was lifted from the Liddell family vault.
In Sibyl: Lover, Muse and Artist (Hogarth Press, 1978), Virginia Cornford argues that Bluey, the mute budgerigar so instrumental in Denzil’s final comeuppance, was based on a canary belonging to Enid Blyton. However, Lady Ann Hastings told John Sparrow that the bird in question was dead before Sibyl could have met it.
There remains the, admittedly remote, possibility that the character of the budgerigar was in some way ‘invented’.