The winter of 1924: Edith Olivier, alone at the age of 51, thought her life had come to an end. For Rex Whistler, a 19-year-old art student, life was just beginning. They were to start an intimate and unlikely friendship that would transform their lives. Gradually Edith's world opened up and she became a writer. Her home became a sanctuary for Whistler and other brilliant and beautiful younger men—Siegfried Sassoon, Stephen Tennant, William Walton, John Betjeman, the Sitwells and Cecil Beaton—for whom she was "all the muses." The story is set against the backdrop of a period that spanned the madcap parties of the 1920s, the sophistication of the 1930s and the drama and austerity of World War II. With an extraordinary cast, from the Royal Family to Tallulah Bankhead, Anna Thomasson's account brings to life, for the first time, the curious, unlikely and fascinating friendship of a bluestocking and a bright young thing.