The Lost Girls Read online

  Peter Quennell’s definition of the Lost Girls, The Wanton Chase (1980)

  . . . an empty and destructive girl, mischievous but never lethal on any big scale.

  Edmund Wilson on Barbara, The Fifties (1985)

  . . . she had a look of someone always struggling to go beyond herself – to escape from her social class, the convent where she was educated, into some pagan aesthete world of artists and literary geniuses who could save her.

  Stephen Spender on Sonia, New Selected Journals (2012)

  On Friday I lunched with Christopher and Camilla and dined with Cyril Connolly. His mistress loves me still.

  Evelyn Waugh on Lys, The Letters of Evelyn Waugh (1980)

  . . . a wayward beauty who had been the Egeria to many remarkable men, some of whom she wed.

  George Weidenfeld on Janetta, Remembering My Good Friends: An Autobiography (1995)

  By the same author

  Fiction

  Great Eastern Land

  Real Life

  English Settlement

  After Bathing at Baxter’s: Stories

  Trespass

  The Comedy Man

  Kept: A Victorian Mystery

  Ask Alice

  At the Chime of a City Clock

  Derby Day

  Secondhand Daylight

  The Windsor Faction

  From the Heart (Amazon Kindle Single)

  Wrote for Luck: Stories

  Rock and Roll is Life

  Non-fiction

  A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the ’80s

  Other People: Portraits from the Nineties (with Marcus Berkmann)

  After the War: The Novel and England Since 1945

  Thackeray

  Orwell: The Life

  On the Corinthian Spirit: The Decline of Amateurism in Sport

  Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918–1940

  What You Didn’t Miss: A Book of Literary Parodies

  The Prose Factory: Literary Life in England Since 1918

  The New Book of Snobs

  THE LOST GIRLS

  Pegasus Books, Ltd.

  148 West 37th Street, 13th Floor

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2020 by D. J. Taylor

  First Pegasus Books hardcover edition January 2020

  Typeset in Garamond Pro by SX Composing DTP, Rayleigh, Essex

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  ISBN: 978-1-64313-315-7

  ISBN: 97-8-164313-376-8 (Ebook)

  Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company