The Souls, Part V
Lady Desborough: Charm, Courage, and Concert Pitch
“Her friends automatically use the words ‘intelligence’, ‘charm’, ‘intuition’, until they are tired and repid.”
It is a deliciously exasperated line. As if language itself ran out when confronted with her.
Lady Desborough, born Ettie Fane, has already appeared at the edges of this series. One cannot write about the Souls without circling Taplow. But now we step fully inside her orbit.
Because she was not simply a member.
She was, as Cynthia Asquith said, “the making of every party.”
Background and Bearing
Ettie Fane was orphaned at five and brought up by her aunt, Lady Cowper, at Panshanger, and among the Cowper houses of Brocket and Wrest. She grew up in a world of houseparties, political conversation, and cultivated society. By the time she married at twenty she knew “all London society, old and young, and all the Souls to be.”
She was tall, about five foot ten, and moved, people said, “like the ladies at Versailles,” with tiny gliding steps. She spoke very slowly and gently. Cynthia Asquith called it “Ettie’s float voice.” Her friends spoke of her dignity of carriage, her dark softly abundant hair, always beautifully coiffed.
She was short sighted and rarely looked directly at the camera. The Souls were born before the days of the obligatory smile.
Anita Leslie later said, “Lady Desborough, always smiling, always with a twinkle in her eye.”
But that smile concealed steel.
