Shock tactics in love and life

In this enthusiastic study of the bohemian Garman family, Cressida Connolly has chosen a hard task. Group biographies are tricky to write and risk being muddling to read: there are 21 Garmans in her index. But her greatest problem has been to make her subjects, in particular Mary, Kathleen and Lorna, the three sisters at the centre of the book, signify in their own right rather than as wives, lovers and muses to a series of more talented men. They were indeed, as she writes, ‘strikingly beautiful, artistic and wild’; but that was about it. As Connolly is too honest to conceal, they were also frequently a pain in the neck.

The whole family — seven girls and two boys, born between 1898 and 1911 — illustrates to perfection the well-established revolt of the young against the social and moral codes of the older generation in the wake of the first world war. The Garman parents were a devoted and devout couple; Walter was a doctor, a churchwarden and a magistrate. The children had a comfortable upbringing in a large house in the West Midlands; they grew up confident and handsome, with rebellious tendencies. By 1919 the two eldest girls, Mary and Kathleen, aged 20 and 18, had run away to London to discover art, life and love.

They soon succeeded, by renting a room on the fringe of Bloomsbury and frequenting the Café Royal, the White Tower and other haunts of artists, writers, musicians and their hangers-on. Both had some talent, Katherine for music and Mary as a painter; but it was their dark beauty and sense of style that brought them attention. They strode around in cloaks and Russian boots, went hatless in summer (‘something only prostitutes had done until then’, apparently) and furnished their room as simply as possible: ‘The Garmans found that a few flowers in a tall vase and a fire in the grate could make a place look wonderful.’