OTTOLINE MORRELL
Ottoline Morrell was the patron par excellence of the artists and writers of Sas- soon’s cultural and literary mileu. She became aware of him when she read his poem ‘To Victory’ in The Times on 15 January 1916, and traced him through Edmund Gosse. She immediately wrote to him of her pleasure at finding “in the dark prison-like days a sympathetic de - sire - to fly out beyond into the beauty and colour and freedom that one so longs for”( Egremont ). While her initial interest in the young poet was not purely literary (writing in her journal in August 1916, “I love him - and long and long for him”), she did much to support his work during his rise to fame, including cajoling Virginia Woolf into writing a positive review of The Old Huntsman , thinking that if he “heard his work had ‘Promise’ it might make him want to live”.
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