Word: bertrand
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Bertrand Russell left his wife for her, though Ottoline remained with her husband. She was the inspiration for the character of Hermione Roddice in D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, the eccentric baronness whose passion for the hero, Birkin, is more a contest of will than a deep emotion. She knew them all: Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, J.M. Keynes, Aldous Huxley, Henry Lamb, William Butler Yeats, Henry James...
Ottoline was described in a number of novels, and rarely kindly. The most famous of them is Women in Love; Lawrence had gotten to know the Morrells through Bertrand Russell, and had visited the manor where Ottoline held court a number of times. She was horrified when she read the description of Hermione, "a tall, slow, reluctant woman...who drifted forward as if scarcely conscious, her long blanched face lifted up, not to see the world." Hermoine is presented as a creature of the intellect, whose intense passion is only superficial. Like Ottoline, she dresses in bright, untidy flowing clothes...
Russell. Nor would it do when in 1927 Bertrand and Dora opened up Beacon Hill, a progressive school where children were allowed to roam the grounds naked and taught how to be good, godless creatures of the earth...
Although far less ambitious and comprehensive than Clark's biography, My Father, Bertrand Russell succeeds better in bringing the man into focus. Katharine Tait, Russell's daughter by Dora, understands what linked the brilliant young nationalist of the Principia Mathematica (who with his teacher Whitehead and his student Wittgenstein redirected modern philosophy away from German idealism) to the political and sexual provocateur of later years: "All his life he sought perfection: perfect mathematical truth, perfect philosophical clarity, a perfect formula for society, and a perfect woman to live with in a perfect human relationship...
...Bertrand Russell insisted on living in the best of all possible worlds and responded to imperfection as if it were a personal insult to his intelligence. That stubbornness made him the pain in the neck par excellence of modern times. Or perhaps, as Tait speculates, it made him a sort of saint - "God's gad fly, sent to challenge the smugness of the churches with a righteousness greater than their...