Henry James wrote of the Brontë sisters:

The romantic tradition of the Brontës, with posterity, has been still more essentially helped, I think, by a force independent of any one of their applied faculties—by the attendant image of their dreary, their tragic history, their loneliness and poverty of life.

The personal position of the three sisters, in short, had become the very tone of their united production.

In somewhat the same fashion the privileged position of Iris Origo (1902–88) has become a part of her literary work. It is as rare as it is wonderful to see a person, born and bred with every advantage—educational, personal, financial, and social—use each advantage to its fullest capacity. Origo was like the man in the parable who turned his five talents into ten.

She was the only child of Bayard Cutting, a...

 

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