It is remarkable how during the past 20 years Edwin Lutyens has gone from being reviled to revered. The steep decline of his reputation following the architect's death in 1944 was probably inevitable given the exceptional success he had previously enjoyed. And the overwhelming presence of modernism, albeit often in a debased mode, during the post-war decades, would also not have helped Lutyens's cause, particularly since he had come to represent the last manifestation of 19th-century visionary romanticis, writes Robert O'Byrne
The Architect and His Wife: A Life of Edwin Lutyens. By Jane Ridley. Chatto & Windus, 484 pp, £25 sterling
But the low regard in which he was once held has now been replaced by adulation, with Lutyens commonly accounted Britain's greatest architect since Wren. That certainly seems to be the opinion of his latest biographer, Jane Ridley, who also happens to be her subject's great-granddaughter. She holds Lutyens in the highest esteem, at least as regards his professional career.
With respect to his personal life, her verdict is understandably more ambiguous. There was an extraordinary contrast between the idyllic image projected by Lutyens's buildings, and the often anarchic chaos of his domestic existence. Correctly, Ridley makes reference to her great-grandmother in the book's title, because Emily Lutyens exercised an unhappily dominant presence over the architect, arising primarily from her own discontent. Her story has been told before, but it deserves repetition, if only to act as a warning of the damage which can be done by dissatisfied spouses.
Emily Lutyens was the daughter of an earl, reflecting Lutyens's inherent snobbery, and had little in common with her husband, not even caring for the nature of his work. After Lutyens received the commission to design the imperial city of New Delhi, she crassly announced the formation of a Home Rule for India League in London, indifferent to the consequences. But most importantly, in the early 1900s, while one of her other discontented siblings became a suffragette, she discovered theosophy, that strange cult which was so unaccountably popular for several decades. Over the best part of 20 years, one of its most ardent followers was Emily Lutyens, who appears to have developed a hopeless crush on Krishnamurti, the young Indian boy selected to be the World Teacher. To help the cause, she travelled the globe - at her husband's expense - but while mixing with the masses never adapted to their circumstances; "Australia sounds too awful," Lutyens wrote to her in 1925. "Poor darling, having to do your own washing."
A few years later, Krishnamurti effectively took control of the theosophy movement and then brought it to a close. Emily Lutyens was devastated that she had devoted so much time to what had proven a worthless cause but still seemed unaware of how damaging her behaviour had been, not just to her husband's career, but to her children, two of whom would eventually commit suicide.
Jane Ridley has structured her book so that the stories of Edwin and Emily Lutyens run in tandem, but the problem is that trying to combine the personal with the professional is almost impossible. It would have been better to have concentrated on either one or the other; as it is, both suffer from too much condensation, with the critique of Lutyens's architecture being, of necessity, cursory. For Irish readers also, there must be disappointment that much of his work here goes completely unmentioned: no reference to Howth Castle or Heywood or the Gardens of Remembrance in Dublin. Lambay is discussed, along with Hugh Lane's struggle to build a new gallery of modern art in the capital, but it is obvious that Ridley has not read more recent material on these subjects and she appears unaware that the National Library of Ireland holds some Lutyens correspondence. This reader was left wanting more.
Robert O'Byrne is a writer. He is the author of Hugh Lane: A Life (Lilliput).