Elinor Glyn’s residency at Montacute House is one of the most dramatic and personal episodes in the estate’s long history. A bestselling novelist and a prominent figure in early twentieth‑century society, she arrived at Montacute in 1915 as the partner of Lord Curzon, who had leased the house during the First World War. What followed was a story of passion, interior transformation and, ultimately, betrayal.
Glyn’s upbringing shaped her public persona. Raised partly under the influence of a French aristocratic grandmother who instilled strict social codes and recounted tales of ancestors escaping the French Revolution, she grew into a woman who understood the rituals of high society despite lacking noble birth herself. Her novels, especially Three Weeks (1906), made her famous and notorious. The book’s success — and its reputation for eroticism — attracted admirers, among them Curzon, who once sent her a tiger skin as fan mail.
Their relationship intensified after Curzon attended a stage adaptation of Three Weeks in 1908. By 1915, as Curzon entered the wartime coalition government, he leased Montacute House and invited Glyn to live with him. The house was cold, unheated and isolated — a stark contrast to her London life — but she embraced the challenge, pouring her energy into transforming the interiors.
Her most ambitious work was in the Garden Chamber, the bedroom overlooking the West Drive and the North (or “Privy”) Garden. Here she created an exotic, highly personal environment: a Harrods washstand, a white sheepskin rug from Harvey Nichols, and a vast oak bed made for Curzon by Halliday of Wells. The centrepiece was a state‑of‑the‑art ensuite bath brought down from London and enclosed behind panelled wooden doors — an extraordinary luxury for a sixteenth‑century house.
The decorative scheme continued through other rooms. The library (or Great Chamber) was given a purple carpet, purple‑and‑orange curtains and green velvet cushions on orange damask armchairs. The effect was intensified by Mazarin blue and gold mandarin jars, tall Chinese vases from Liberty, a green brocade priest’s robe draped over a chest, and three tiger skins Curzon had brought back from India. Glyn’s aesthetic — bold, theatrical and unapologetically sensuous — briefly overlaid Montacute’s Elizabethan structure with early twentieth‑century exotica.
Glyn was also devoted to her two Persian cats, Candide and Zadig, who accompanied her to Montacute. They appear in contemporary photographs taken at the house, and her nephew Anthony Glyn later described them as “beautiful, proud, independent creatures … in many ways very like their mistress”. Their presence added a domestic, almost theatrical note to her life at Montacute. In 1939, long after she had left the house, she famously attended a literary lunch wearing Candide asleep around her neck.
But while Glyn endured the cold and isolation to create a shared home, Curzon’s affections shifted. It appears likely that he had moved her to Montacute partly to remove her from London society while he pursued a new relationship with the wealthy American heiress Grace Duggan. By spring 1916 Glyn sensed something was wrong. Her fears were confirmed on 10 December 1916 when she opened the newspaper to find, on the same page that announced Curzon’s appointment to Lloyd George’s War Cabinet, the announcement of his engagement to Duggan.
There was no letter, no explanation and no attempt at reconciliation. In a fury, Glyn burned all 500 of Curzon’s love letters in the fireplace of the Garden Chamber — the same room she had transformed for him. She left Montacute immediately and never spoke to him again. Curzon married Duggan in January 1917.
Glyn later rebuilt her life, eventually working in Hollywood as an adviser on style and screen presence. Yet traces of her time at Montacute remain: the ensuite bath she installed, and a panel of Genoese wallpaper now hidden behind a radiator. Some visitors claim the room still carries a sense of melancholy — a faint echo of the passion and disappointment that once played out there.
