According to Rebecca West, F. Tennyson Jesse was 'ideally beautiful. I have never seen a lovelier girl.' A sketch in Joanna Colenbrander's biography shows a flat, winsome face with wide, rather fishy eyes; her thin limbs are splayed out with flapperish elegance. It may be that her attractions - a fat bundle of love-letters was destroyed when she died, and Mrs Colenbrander finds several witnesses to testify to her 'aura' - had less to do with ideal beauty than with loquaciousness and flair. She published more than thirty books,[*] and was praised for her 'masculine insight into human motives', but her most enduring fictional creations are women who passed themselves off as gorgeous.

LRB 7 June 1984 | PDF Download