“Euphemia was not a good chooser of men, counting the appalling Aleister Crowley among her lovers .”

Euphemia Lamb, born Annie Euphemia Forrest in Ormskirk, Lancashire, was a constant source of fascination to the Stephen sisters. They first met in 1905, when Euphemia dazzled into their drawing room on the arm of her newly acquired fiancé, the painter Henry Lamb. Andrea Obholzer’s slim biography, A Bloomsbury Ingénue, is misleadingly titled, since ingénue was emphatically what Euphemia was not. She spun tall tales about a wealthy family and a Russian count whose clutches she had evaded; and she was, at 17, so pretty that everybody wanted to paint her. Virginia Woolf was to base the unreliable Florinda in Jacob’s Room on her, and she dances in and out of Woolf’s letters and diaries for many years, just as she flitted between bohemian London and Paris as artist’s model and muse.

Transgressive and outlandish, she was hardly a good chooser of men, counting the appalling Aleister Crowley among her many lovers, all of whom she drove mad with lust. Meanwhile, she was furthering her own education by mugging up on Shelley and Dangerous Liaisons – appropriately.

Obholzer presents her as an emancipated woman who could ‘embrace the male gaze and be empowered by it’. She did indeed eventually settle down and enjoyed a successful career as a café hostess, hobnobbing with Augustus John to the end.

— Ariane Bankes, The Spectator, March 2025