During the 1920s three writers, Osbert, Edith and Sacheverell Sitwell, became the generally acknowledged rivals of the Bloomsbury Group. According to their friend Evelyn Waugh, they ‘radiated an aura of high spirits, elegance, impudence, unpredictability, above all of sheer enjoyment. They declared war on dullness.’1
Behind the ‘Trio’ stood Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire, the family’s home since 1625, which down the generations has affected everybody who lived there. In a beautiful setting, filled with treasures, it enchanted all three when they were young. ‘The Sitwells might wander far from Renishaw, but they would always return in spirit,’ wrote Harold Acton.2 Rex Whistler, no stranger to great mansions, thought it the most exciting house in England, while it replaced Madresfield in Evelyn Waugh’s affections. Osbert’s lasting achievement was commissioning John Piper to paint it.
Unfairly, the Trio blamed their father Sir George for failing to save their beautiful, brainless mother from a prison sentence, while they resented being dependent on him for money. Osbert and Edith turned him into a figure of fun in their autobiographies, a caricature accepted unquestioningly by everyone who writes about the Sitwells.3 So far, nobody has acknowledged just how much he formed the minds of his children. For, while undeniably eccentric, he was also brilliantly gifted – a pioneer in re-discovering Baroque art, and one of the finest landscape gardeners of his day. Above all, he was the creator of modern Renishaw.
His children’s impact on the arts and their role as arbiters of taste have been forgotten (even if Edith’s verse still has admirers); so too has their feud with Bloomsbury, and all the malicious gossip that accompanied it. Yet their friends included Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon, Anthony Powell, L. P. Hartley, Dylan Thomas, Graham Greene and (up to a point) Virginia Woolf. Osbert’s closest literary friendship was with Evelyn Waugh.
However, the Trio are just a part of this modest chronicle of Renishaw Hall and its squires. Among the owners have been a Cavalier, a Jacobite, and a Regency Buck who added palatial new rooms. Not least was the maligned Sir George Sitwell, who, besides transforming the house’s interior, created the gardens. The book’s climax is Renishaw’s triumphant restoration.