In memory of Esther Wyndham
Mary Lutyens, a prolific novelist, biographer, magazine writer and editor whose career spanned more than six decades, passed away April 9, 1999. She was 90. Lutyens, whose father was the well-known architect Sir Edwin Lutyens and whose maternal grandfather, the Earl of Lytton, was viceroy of India from 1876-1880, died in London.
Although she wrote 13 novels and excelled as an editor, she was most acclaimed for her biographies, including writings on her father's work, her parents' unhappy marriage and her grandfather. She also wrote a biographical series on the Indian religious teacher Krishnamurti, who was a spiritual adviser to her mother, and about art critic and social theorist John Ruskin and his wife Effie. One of her best known biographies, "Millais and the Ruskins," explored John and Effie's relationship with Sir John Everett Millais, the father of Pre-Raphaelite painting. It described the impact of Millais' love for Effie on the Ruskin marriage and its eventual collapse.
"You so often have to write the book you want to read," The Daily Telegraph quoted her as having once said.
Her autobiography, "To be Young," was published in 1959. Lutyens was born July 31, 1908 and was educated at Queen's College in London and in Sydney, Australia. She began her career as a fiction writer with the 1933 "Forthcoming Marriages," and wrote several novels before World War II. After the war, she wrote romance novels under the pseudonym Esther Wyndham.
Lutyens was married twice, first to stockbroker Anthony Sewell from 1930-1945, then to royal furrier and art expert J. G. Links in 1945. Links died in 1997.
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