Mary Lutyens


Edith Penelope Mary Lutyens was a British author who is principally known for her authoritative biographical works on the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti.

Early life

Mary Lutyens was born in London, the fourth and youngest daughter of the architect Edwin Lutyens, and his wife Emily Bulwer-Lytton. Emily was the daughter of Robert Bulwer-Lytton, Viceroy of India, and the granddaughter of the writer and politician Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Mary was the younger sister of the composer Elisabeth Lutyens.
As a child Mary spent time with her maternal grandmother Edith, the former vicereine, who lived at Knebworth, thirty miles from London, with her daughter the suffragette Constance Bulwer-Lytton. Edwin Lutyens had designed a dower house for his mother-in-law called Homewood.
As a result of her mother's interest in theosophy, Mary met Krishnamurti when she was a child: she knew him from 1911 until his death in 1986.
, Australia
In the 1920s, her father was working on his buildings at Delhi. Mary visited India with her mother and went to Australia, staying at The Manor, a centre run by Charles Webster Leadbeater in Mosman, New South Wales, while Krishnamurti and his brother Nitya stayed at another house nearby. Lutyens stayed there for some time, which eventually provided her with material for her book Krishnamurti: The Years of Awakening.

Career

Biography

Apart from her works on Krishnamurti, Lutyens wrote biographies of John Ruskin, Effie Gray and her own family. In her book Millais and the Ruskins she put forward the controversial argument that Ruskin could not consummate his marriage because he was repelled by his wife's pubic hair.

Fiction

She wrote novels under the pseudonym 'Esther Wyndham' for the Mills & Boon and Harlequin Romance imprints.

Personal life

Mary Lutyens married twice. Her first marriage, in 1930, to Anthony Rupert Herbert Franklin Sewell, a stockbroker, produced one daughter, Amanda Lutyens Sewell, but ended in divorce in 1945. Her second marriage, in 1945, was to Joseph Gluckstein Links, art historian and royal furrier, and ended with his death in 1997.

Works