This is the tale of a modern Cinderella: the success story of the Victorian scullery-maid who, through her masterly cooking even more than her blonde beauty, became the hostess, entertainer and intimate friend of peers, princes, kings and emperors. It is also the tale of the ‘Cavendish’, the old Georgian hotel in Jermyn Street that Rosa Lewis bought at the turn of the century and transformed into the meeting-place of international aristocracy, art and fashion.
Beautiful, distinguished in manner, masterful in character, hard-headed and bluntly witty, Rosa, as proprietress of the ‘Cavendish’, conferred her colourful personality on the hotel that she owned, making it so famous that Rosa’ and the ‘Cavendish’ — whose visitors’-book read like a compound of Debrett, the Almanach de Gotha and the New York Social Register — became synonymous terms.
Rosa Lewis will be remembered as the quintessence of the Edwardian Age. And, with London the background to her fabulous career, Michael Harrison has brilliantly succeeded in vividly creating that brief, slightly raffish, assured, opulent and splendid era.
e-Book, 236 pp.
12 illos & Index
(Tina Rhea #41)
ISBN 978-1-55497-290-6 $10.00